ISBN: 9780747545637

Paperback: 530 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000
Language English
Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 12.8 x 3.8 cm

At either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds. In 1901, Lady Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, leaves England for Egypt, an outpost for the Empire roiling with national sentiment. Venturing out of the British ex-pat comfort zone, she finds herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with an Egyptian patriot, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist and a descendant of Anna and Sharif, goes to Egypt, taking with her an old family trunk. The notes and journals found in the trunk will reveal he ancestors’ lives and will profoundly transform her own.

Described by the Literary Review as a ‘moving and entirely convincing…a triumphant achievement’