The Map of Love: A Novel

Booker Prize Finalist

"Sweeping and evocative--. An unconventional love story."--The Times (London)

With her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif garnered comparisons to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and George Eliot.In her latest novel, which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, she combines the romantic skill of the nineteenth-century novelists with a very modern sense of culture and politics--both sexual and international.

At either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds. In 1901, Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, leaves England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with nationalist sentiment. Far from the comfort of the British colony, she finds herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist and descendant of Anna and Sharif has fallen in love with Omar al-Ghamrawi, a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor with his own passionate politics. In an attempt to understand her conflicting emotions and to discover the truth behind her heritage, Isabel, too, travels to Egypt, and enlists Omar's sister's help in unravelling the story of Anna and Sharif's love.

Joining the romance and intricate storytelling of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Ahdaf Soueif has once again created a mesmerizing tale of genuine eloquence and lasting importance.

At the end of the twentieth century, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist, journeys to Egypt to unravel the truth behind her ancestor Anna Winterbourne, an English widow who, in 1901, falls in love with an Egyptian, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, a love affair that is echoed in her own turbulent relationship with a gifted Egyptian-American conductor. A Booker Prize finalist. Original. 50,000 first printing.

Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England.She lives in London.