Man, Omar al-Ghamrawi, a charismatic Egyptian conductor famous internationally not only for his musicianship but for his articulate espousal of the Arab cause. At a dinner party, Isabel meets and falls in love with an older The trunk has been found in 1997 by Isabel Parkman, a young journalist in New York, among the belongings of her mother, Jasmine, who is in the terminal stages of Alzheimer's disease. With this, Soueif alerts us to the fact that her novel requires - and deserves - an active, attentive audience. We fit together the intersecting stories at the same pace as the characters, except that we can get a head start by consulting the family tree that precedes the text. In a way, these discoveries are like the objects that are gradually unpackedįrom the old trunk that is at the heart of the book. In ''The Map of Love,'' stories - and histories and mysteries - are encountered piecemeal by the reader, just as they are by the characters themselves. Politics and love, the narrative unfolds obliquely - so obliquely that it even starts in midsentence. Although a key part of the novel's maturity is its ability to face up squarely to both The intersecting stories of three women - Egyptian, American, English - one of whom lives a century earlier than the other two. Hdaf SOUEIF'S latest novel, which was a finalist for last year's Booker Prize, is a wonderfully accomplished and mature work of fiction telling A novel of Egypt interweaves the lives of three women, one long dead.

The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif