Returned to her homeland, Amal loses herself cathartically in the remnants of Anna's life: ''That is the beauty of the past there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of Having escaped a broken marriage in England and

It is Amal who pieces Anna's story together, although the author's inventive use of letters, diaries, dialogue and reconstructed narrative keeps the other characters' voices vividly alive. Yet once Isabel arrives in Cairo, both projects are shelvedĪs the trunk turns into her own and Amal's version of Pandora's box. Isabel decides to combine this visit with a journalistic assignment she also toys with the notion of making a film from her grandmother's story. Isabel tells Omar about the trunk in an effort to get closer to him, and he suggests that she take it to Cairo to show his sister, Amal, who might be willing to translate the Arabic journalsĪnd papers. What Isabel hadn't realized - because the intervening generations hid their Middle Eastern ancestry - is that Anna had married an Egyptian, Trunk, which belonged to her English great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. Isabel has been starting to look through the contents of the

Man, Omar al-Ghamrawi, a charismatic Egyptian conductor famous internationally not only for his musicianship but for his articulate espousal of the Arab cause. At a dinner party, Isabel meets and falls in love with an older The trunk has been found in 1997 by Isabel Parkman, a young journalist in New York, among the belongings of her mother, Jasmine, who is in the terminal stages of Alzheimer's disease. With this, Soueif alerts us to the fact that her novel requires - and deserves - an active, attentive audience. We fit together the intersecting stories at the same pace as the characters, except that we can get a head start by consulting the family tree that precedes the text. In a way, these discoveries are like the objects that are gradually unpackedįrom the old trunk that is at the heart of the book. In ''The Map of Love,'' stories - and histories and mysteries - are encountered piecemeal by the reader, just as they are by the characters themselves.

Politics and love, the narrative unfolds obliquely - so obliquely that it even starts in midsentence. Although a key part of the novel's maturity is its ability to face up squarely to both

The intersecting stories of three women - Egyptian, American, English - one of whom lives a century earlier than the other two. Hdaf SOUEIF'S latest novel, which was a finalist for last year's Booker Prize, is a wonderfully accomplished and mature work of fiction telling A novel of Egypt interweaves the lives of three women, one long dead.

The map of love by ahdaf soueif