| Chronicle of a Last Summer |
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Subtitle:
A Novel of Egypt
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Book Category:
Fiction > Literary
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Author:
El Rashidi, Yasmine
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Editor::
Duggan, Tim
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ISBN 13:
9780770437299
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Price:
USD $22.00
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Publication Year:
2016
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Publisher Info
Penguin Random House. InquiryCairo, 1984. A blisteringly hot summer. A young girl in a sprawling family house. Her days pass quietly: listening to her mother's phone conversations, looking at the Nile from a bedroom window, watching the three state-sanctioned TV stations with the volume off, daydreaming about other lives. Underlying this claustrophobic routine is mystery and loss. Relatives mutter darkly about the newly-appointed President Mubarak. Everyone talks with melancholy about the past. People disappear overnight. Her own father has left, too--why, or to where, no one will say.
The story unfolds over three pivotal summers, from her youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can't ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life.
At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single Egyptian family, Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.