Chicago: A Modern Arabic Novel

Sex, money, and politics are the driving forces of society in this new novel from bestselling author Alaa Al Aswany. A medley of Egyptian and American lives collides on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center in a post-9/11 Chicago, a... Read more

Sex, money, and politics are the driving forces of society in this new novel from bestselling author Alaa Al Aswany. A medley of Egyptian and American lives collides on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center in a post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound. Among the players are an atheistic anti-establishment American professor of the sixties generation, whose relationship with a younger African-American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance; a veiled Ph.D. candidate whose conviction in the code of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society; an ??migr?? who has fervently embraced his new American identity, but who cannot escape his Egyptian roots when faced with the issue of his daughter??'s ???honor???; an Egyptian State Security informant who spouts religious doctrines while hankering after money and power; and a dissident student poet who comes to America with the sole aim of financing his literary aspirations, but whose experience in Chicago turns out to be more than he bargained for.In this tightly plotted page-turner, details of intimate pleasures and pains are injected with snippets of human history, ranging from the plight of Native Americans to the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain. The interplay of private and public sheds light on key global issues of our day, particularly racial and religious tensions in an increasingly paranoid world. Chicago is set far from the downtown Cairo of Al Aswany??'s The Yacoubian Building, but is no less unflinching an examination of contemporary Egyptian lives. Less