![]() ![]() Anna's journal entries are particularly evocative. Soueif (In the Eye of the Sun) writes simply and, on occasion, beautifully. ""I cannot help thinking that when she chose to step off the well-trodden paths of expatriate life, Anna must have secretly wanted something out of the ordinary to happen to her,"" muses Amal, who begins to realize that the same applies to her own life. As a young English widow, Anna traveled to turn-of-the-century Egypt, then an English colony, and fell in love with an Egyptian man. As the two soon discover, Isabel is Amal's distant cousin, and the papers belonged to their mutual great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. Lugging with her a mysterious trunk of papers bequeathed to her by her mother, Isabel turns up at Omar's sister Amal's house in Cairo and explains that Omar had said she might be interested in translating the papers. ![]() Once in Egypt, Isabel neglects her project for a more personal investigation. ![]() But her interest in Egypt has more to do with her crush on Omar al-Ghamrawi, a passionate and difficult older Egyptian-American conductor and political writer, than with her work. ![]() In 1997, Isabel Parkman, a recently divorced American journalist, travels to Egypt to research about the impending millennium. Coincidence-personal, political and cultural-rules in this burnished, ultra-romantic Booker Prize finalist. ![]()
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