The author of the highly-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building returns with a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition set in Chicago with a cast of American and Arab characters achingly human in their desires and needs. Egyptian and American lives collide on a college campus in post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound in this extraordinary and eagerly anticipated new novel from Alaa al Aswany. Among the players are a sixties-style antiestablishment professor whose relationship with a younger African American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance; a veiled PhD candidate whose conviction in the principles of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society.
