AHDAF SOUEIF

Lady Anna, una joven aristócrata inglesa de visita en El Cairo, concibe un arriesgado plan para burlar la rigidez colonial que le impide conocer un mundo que la fascina. Sin embargo, fustrada su aventura por un grupo de nacionalistas egipcios que la confunden con otra persona, es llevada a la casa de Sharif al-Baroudi, un abogado egipcio entregada a la causa de su país. El encuentro entre ambos cambiará radicalmente sus vidas.

En los albores del siglo XX, el colonialismo europeo impone su ley en África del Norte. Lady Anna Winterbourne, una joven aristócrata inglesa de visita en El Cairo, concibe un arriesgado plan para burlar la rigidez de una sociedad colonial que le impide conocer un mundo que la fascina. Sin embargo, frustrada su aventura por un grupo de nacionalistas egipcios que la confunde con otra persona, es llevada a casade Sharif al-Baroudi, un abogado egpicio entregado a la causa de su pais. El encuentro entre ambos cambiara radicalmente sus vidas.En uno de los escenarios mas tumultuosos de la epoca, la rapacidad de Occidente, el cinismo de las potencias, las intrigas en torno a la Sublime Puerta y el comienzo de la colonizacion sionista en Palestina seran algunos de los obstaculos con los que se enfrentara su amor. Cien años mas tarde, inspirado por el hallazgo de un baul que contiene cartas, rocrtes de reiodicos y diarios amarillentos, Isabel Parkman, bisnieta de la pareja, se propone reconstruir la historia de aquella pasion.Con una aproximacion muy ponderada al inevitable conflicto entre colonizador y colonizado, la autora ha logrado recrear con maestria los matices y contrates de una sociedad en crisis, donde las relaciones personales son a la vez sujetos pasivos y activos del devenir historico.

Ahdaf Soueif, the bestselling author of The Map of Love, writes poignantly and beautifully about love, and about finding ones place in the world. Achingly lyrical, resonant and richly woven, and with a spark of defiance, these stories explore areas of tensionwhere women and men are ensnared by cultural and social mores and prescribed notions of love, where the place you are is not the place you want to be. Soueif draws her characters with infinite tenderness and compassion as they inhabit a world of lost opportunities, unfulfilled love, and remembrance of times past.

Starting in 1970, Jean Genetpetty thief, prostitute, modernist masterspent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the authors commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genets most overtly political book is also his most personalthe last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thiefs Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genets final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.

Booker Prize Finalist Here is an extraordinary cross-cultural love story that unfurls across Egypt, England, and the United States over the course of a century. Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist, has fallen in love with a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor. Shadowing her romance is the courtship of her great-grandparents Anna and Sharif nearly one hundred years before. In 1900 the recently widows Anna Winterbourne left England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with political sentiment. She soon found herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, an Egyptian nationalist. When Isabel, in an attempt to discover the truth behind her heritage, reenacts Annas excursion to Egypt, the story of her great-grandparents unravels before her, revealing startling parallels for her own life. Combining the romance and intricate narrative of a nineteenth-century novel with a very modern sense of culture and politicsboth sexual and internationalAhdaf Soueif has created a thoroughly seductive and mesmerizing tale.

From the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist The Map of Lovean incisive collection of essays on Arab identity, art, and politics that seeks to locate the mezzaterra, or common ground, in an increasingly globalized world.The twenty-five years worth of criticism and commentary collected here have earned Ahdaf Soueif a place among our most prominent Arab intellectuals. Clear-eyed and passionate, and syndicated throughout the world, they are the direct result of Soueifs own circumstances of being like hundreds of thousands of others: people with an Arab or a Muslim background doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a western mirror. Whether an account of visiting Palestine and entering the Noble Sanctuary for the first time, an interpretation of women who choose to wear the veil, or her postSeptember 11 reflections, Soueifs intelligent, fearless, deeply informed essays embody the modern search for identity and community.

Set amidst the turmoil of contemporary Middle Eastern politics, this vivid and highly-acclaimed novel by an Egyptian journalist is an intimate look into the lives of Arab women today. Here, a woman who grows up among the Egyptian elite, marries a Westernized husband, and, while pursuing graduate study, becomes embroiled in a love affair with an uncouth Englishman.