This brief, beautifically crafted novel introduces one of the finest contemporary Arab novelists to English-speaking audiences. In it, Bahaa' Taher, one of a group of Egyptian writers—including the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz—noted for their revealing portraits of Egyptian life and society, tells the dramatic story of a young Muslim who, when his life is threatened, finds sanctuary in a community of Coptic monks. It is a tale of honor and of the terrible demands of blood vengeance; it probes the question of how a people or nation can become divided against itself. Taher has a magical gift for evoking the village life of Upper Egypt—a vastly different setting than urban Cairo and a landscape that tourists usually glimpse only from the windows of trains and buses taking them to the Pharaonic sites. Here, where Christians and Muslims have coexisted peacefully for centuries, where the traditions of the Coptic Church are as powerful as those of the Muslims, Taher crafts an intricate and compelling tale of far-reaching implications. With a powerful narrative voice and a genius for capturing the complex nuances of human interaction, Taher brilliantly depicts the poignant drama of a traditional society caught up in the process of change.

In Egypt, a Muslim on the run from a family feud seeks refuge in a Christian monastery. The novel traces the abrasive relationship between him and the monks. A clash of cultures.

In Egypt, a Muslim on the run from a family feud seeks refuge in a Christian monastery. The novel traces the abrasive relationship between him and the monks. A clash of cultures.

A new paperback edition of a haunting novel of love and loss and the impossibility of true exile from the world

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.

Nada is no stranger to protest. She is five years old when her French mother takes her to visit her Egyptian father, a political activist with a passing resemblance to President Nasser, in prison. When he returns home five years later, a changed man, their little family begins to fracture and eventually Nada's mother moves back to Paris. Through her teenage years Nada is surrounded by the language of protest – 'anarchism', 'Trotskyism', 'communism' – and, one summer in Paris, she discovers the '68 movement and her first love. And how to slam doors in anger. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Through student sit-ins, imprisonments, passionate arguments, accidental alliances, fallen friends, joys and regrets, Nada's story grows into the story of Egypt's many celebrated activists such as Arwa and Siham. Moving, uplifting and deeply human, Radwa Ashour's masterpiece is the story of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century and a paean to all those who choose a life of activism and quiet defiance.

Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize. Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their married and unmarried lives, and their respective books. With her novel’s structure, Ashour pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka (the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life and beyond).

Quasicrystals: The State of the Art has proven to be a useful introduction to quasicrystals for mathematicians, physicists, materials scientists, and students. The original intent was for the book to be a progress report on recent developments in the field. However, the authors took care to adopt a broad, pedagogical approach focusing on points of lasting value. Many subtle and beautiful aspects of quasicrystals are explained in this book (and nowhere else) in a way that is useful for both the expert and the student. In this second edition, some authors have appended short notes updating their essays. Two new chapters have been added. Chapter 16, by Goldman and Thiel, reviews the experimental progress since the first edition (1991) in making quasicrystals, determining their structure, and finding applications. In Chapter 17, Steinhardt discusses the quasi-unit cell picture, a promising, new approach for describing the structure and growth of quasicrystals in terms of a single, repeating, overlapping cluster of atoms.

Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour's Siraaj: An Arab Tale tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island's despotic sultan. Amina, a baker in the sultan's palace, anxiously awaits her son's return from a long voyage at sea, fearful that the sea has claimed Saïd just as it did his father and grandfather. Saïd, left behind in Alexandria by his ship as the British navy begins an attack on the city, slowly begins to make his way home, witnessing British colonial oppression along the way. Saïd's return brings Amina only a short-lived peace. The lessons he learned from the Egyptians' struggle against the British have radicalized him. When Saïd learns the island's slave population is planning a revolt against the sultan's tyrannical rule, both he and Amina are soon drawn in. Beautifully rendered from Arabic into English by Barbara Romaine, Radwa Ashour's novella speaks of the unity that develops among varied peoples as they struggle against a common oppressor and illuminates the rich cultures of both the Arab and African inhabitants of the island. Sub-Saharan African culture is a subject addressed by few Arabic novelists, and Radwa Ashour's novella does much to fill that void.