Chicago

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.

"Egyptian author al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) weaves a vivid tapestry of clashing cultures in post-9/11 Chicago. Dr. Ra'fat Thabit, an Egyptian-American professor at the University of Illinois Medical School, has burrowed deep into American culture, but finds his identity threatened after his rebellious daughter falls under the sway of a shady boyfriend. Ra'fat's colleague, Dr. Muhammad Shamay, retreats from his American wife into extended reveries of his life in Cairo in the 1970s when he was young and in love with a revolutionary. His histology student, Nagi Abd al-Samad, really wants to be a poet. Nagi begins a relationship with an American girl named Wendy (who just so happens to be Jewish). Meanwhile, Shymaa Muhammadi, a medical student who wears a veil, finds her traditional values under siege when Tariq Haseeb, another Egyptian med student, begins seducing her with dogged persistence. The characters are beautifully realized — Ra'fat's family trouble is especially well done — and though their cumulative effect is muted, each of the story lines is individually compelling." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The new novel from the author of the international bestseller, The Yacoubian Building

Internationally bestselling author Alaa Al Aswany was born in 1957. A dentist by profession, he is the author of The Yacoubian Building, which has been translated into twenty languages, and the story collection Friendly Fire, which will be published in English in 2009. He lives in Cairo.