Description:
"Taher is by far the best and most original contemporary Egyptian writer."--Muhammad Siddiq, University of California, Berkeley
"It is a compelling and fascinating book, written in a direct and terse style by a writer who paid attention to his world and saw its limitations clearly but who remembers it with nostalgia and affection."--Segno Sette
Review Quotes: "Beyond the events, Taher draws a very lively portrait of a woman of Islamic civilization in the 1960s, where women, holding their chador between their teeth while their hands serve their men, play the part of the protagonists who are silent but very powerful in the life of the community--a community that is disintegrating with the departure of women for the social emanicipation offered by the big city, and with the end of Safiyya [the book's heroine] and of the superstitions that have persecuted her, as for millenia they have persecuted Egypt, crushed by its myths and by cultural tradition immobilized by time."--"Il Sole 24 Ore