Chronicle Of A Last Summer: A Novel Of Egypt

"Today, stories about Egypt often conjure up images of Tahrir Square protests and political unrest, but so much of Yasmine El Rashidi’s novel — which documents three summers (1984, 1998 and 2014) in the life of a young Egyptian woman — is about silence. When the book’s unnamed narrator asks, as a child, where her father has gone, no one will say. (He was forced to flee the government.) And later, when he returns, no one tells her why her parents are no longer living together. El Rashidi’s story explores how one can be a participant and an observer of political change, and how so much of our politics are formed by the things we don’t say in public and the questions we are afraid to ask."