The map of love /
Material type: TextPublication details: New York : Anchor Books, 2000.Edition: 1st Anchor Books edDescription: 529 p. ; 21 cmISBN:- 0385720114
- 9780385720113
- 823/.914 21
- PR6069.O78 M37 2000
- 18.07
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Fiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | SOUEIF (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610017152864 | |||
Standard Loan | Priest Lake Library Adult Fiction | Priest Lake Library | Book | F SOU (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610016217106 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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 Anna's 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 politics--both sexual and international--Ahdaf Soueif has created a thoroughly seductive and mesmerizing tale.
Isabel Parkman, an American journalist, discovers that her romance with an Egyptian-American conductor is paralleled by her great-grandparents' romance.
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
This exotic family saga/romance by the Egyptian-born Soueif is based on a conceit: the discovery of family letters and diaries by New York journalist Isabel, which leads to her discovery of the Egyptian branch of the family she never knew she had. Isabel's great-grandmother was a young English widow who traveled to Egypt to see where her young husband had fought in World War I. Abducted by Egyptian nationalists while in disguise as a male, she subsequently fell in love with an Egyptian man. Her story is slowly unraveled when Isabel returns the trunk containing her papers to the sister of an Egyptian doctor from New York, both of whom turn out to be her long-lost cousins. This colorful, involving story offers a good dose of history of the struggle for Egyptian independence from British rule. Recommended as something a little different where historical romances are popular.ÄAnn H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
CoincidenceÄpersonal, political and culturalÄrules in this burnished, ultra-romantic Booker Prize finalist. In 1997, Isabel Parkman, a recently divorced American journalist, travels to Egypt to research about the impending millennium. 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. Once in Egypt, Isabel neglects her project for a more personal investigation. 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. As the two soon discover, Isabel is Amal's distant cousin, and the papers belonged to their mutual great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. 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. "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. Soueif (In the Eye of the Sun) writes simply and, on occasion, beautifully. Anna's journal entries are particularly evocative. Sticklers for narrative detail might chafe at the number of incredible coincidences, including a bizarre twist involving Isabel's mother and Omar, and forsaken plot devices (Isabel's millennium project is never mentioned after her arrival in Egypt). On balance, however, Soueif weaves the stories of three formidable women from vastly different times and countries into a single absorbing tale. 6-city author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedBooklist Review
In parallel love stories set nearly 100 years apart, Soueif combines politics and romance in something of an eternal spiral connecting two families and two cultures. Isabel travels from New York to Cairo with a trunk containing diaries and possessions of her great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. Omar, a conductor of international fame (and the man Isabel loves), refers her to his sister Amal for help in understanding the contents. What he fails to tell her is that they are distant cousins: Sharif, the man who becomes Anna's husband, is Amal and Omar's great-uncle. And so, in turn, we learn of Anna's life and love for Sharif and her adopted country and of Isabel and Omar. Amal, the link between the two worlds, untangles the old story and entangles a new one. By juxtaposing the past with the present, the prejudices and politics are contrasted with each other and are shown to be remarkably similar. This, a very romantic book with Anna as its most interesting character, offers insights into both historic and modern Egypt. --Danise HooverKirkus Book Review
The lives of two restless women separated both by a century and from all they love most are explored in replete parallel narrativesin this Booker-nominated third novel from the Egyptian-born British author (In the Eye of the Sun, 1993, etc.). In 1901, Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne, living in British-occupied Cairo, is left alone when her husband in essence dies of depression and despair over his countrys arrogant cruelty toward this newest jewel in its crown. Determined to penetrate to the heart of Egypts patient, seductive mysteries, Anna ends up a captive in the home of prominent attorney and political figure Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, who will become her second husband. The story of their arduous effort to blend in their own union the best of their two warring cultures is uncovered in the late 1990s by Annas great-granddaughter Isabel Parkman, a journalist whos researching Egyptian concepts of, and attitudes toward, the approaching millennium. Isabels life imitates Annas to the extent that she too is in love with a native Egyptian: volatile symphony conductor, writer, and political activist Omar, who has fathered her childperhaps with the aid of a talisman: a piece of a tapestry woven by Anna, depicting the fertility myth of Isis and Osiris. Much of this complex and exotic material is as engrossing as it is instructive, though Isabels gradual understanding of the world through which her ancestor hopefully moved (and by which she was eventually, brutally bereft and rejected) is too often conveyed in virtual lectures offered by Isabels researcher and mentor Amalwho is, in another parallelism that seems altogether too forced, the great-granddaughter of Annas companion and soulmate, her Egyptian sister-in-law Layla. Conversely, the Anna Winterbourne plot is often stunningly dramatic: Soueif makes us believe in this passionate exiles deep identification with her embattled host country and genuine love for the man who embodies it for her. Honestly earned echoes of A Passage to India, in an ambitious, gorgeously written near-miss.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She lives in London.(Bowker Author Biography)
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