An intimate yet panoramic view of religious coexistence in Cairo

Egyptian Muslims and Jews were not always at odds. Before the Arab-Israeli wars, before the mass exodus of Jews from Egypt, there was harmony. Spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, this sweeping novel accompanies Galal, a young boy with a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, through his childhood and boyhood in a vibrant popular quarter of Cairo. With his schoolboy crushes and teen rebellions, Galal is deeply Egyptian, knit tightly into the middle-class fabric of manners, morals, and traditions that cheerfully incorporates and transcends religion-a fabric about to be torn apart by a bigger world of politics that will put Galal's very identity to the test.