The Map of Love

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 09/12/2000
ISBN: 9780385720113
Pages: 544
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 8.12h x 5.20w x 1.00d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2000 pg. 1068
Publishers Weekly 08/14/2000 pg. 326
Library Journal 11/15/2000 pg. 98
New York Times 12/03/2000 pg. 69
Booklist 09/01/2000 pg. 67
Publishers Weekly 08/11/2000