“In this beautifully crafted novel, there are luminous moments where history literally arrives at a village swept by more than a century of colonial rule, revolutions, and wars. In its evocation of imagined history and fictive events, the novel … invites us to reflect on the boundaries that separate the village from modernity, fiction from history, and art from life.”-Tahia Abdel Nasser, Mahfouz Medal Award Committee

Ezzat El Kamhawi, an Egyptian novelist and journalist, was born in 1961 and studied journalism at Cairo University. He is the editor-in-chief of al-Doha Cultural Magazine. He is the author of ten books, including four novels and two collections of short stories. Nancy Roberts is the translator of Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (AUC Press, 2007), for which she received a commendation in the Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Translation. Her most recent translations are Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses (AUC Press, 2012), and Abdulaziz Al Farsi’s Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs (AUC Press, 2013).