To their surprise, they stumble across some unsuspected connections between their own families. Together the two women begin to uncover the stories embedded in the journal of Lady Anna Winterbourne, who traveled to Egypt in 1900 and fell in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian nationalist. And Omar directs her in turn to his sister Amal in Cairo. Incapable of deciphering this stash by herself, she turns to Omar al-Ghamrawi, a man with whom she is falling in love. There Isabel Parkman discovers an old trunk full of documents-some in English, some in Arabic-in her dying mother's apartment. (Sept.Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love is a massive family saga, a story that draws its readers into two moments in the complex, troubled history of modern Egypt. On balance, however, Soueif weaves the stories of three formidable women from vastly different times and countries into a single absorbing tale. Sticklers for narrative detail might chafe at the number of incredible coincidences, including a bizarre twist involving Isabel's mother and Omar, and forsaken plot devices (Isabel's millennium project is never mentioned after her arrival in Egypt). Anna's journal entries are particularly evocative. Soueif (In the Eye of the Sun) writes simply and, on occasion, beautifully. ""I cannot help thinking that when she chose to step off the well-trodden paths of expatriate life, Anna must have secretly wanted something out of the ordinary to happen to her,"" muses Amal, who begins to realize that the same applies to her own life.
As a young English widow, Anna traveled to turn-of-the-century Egypt, then an English colony, and fell in love with an Egyptian man. As the two soon discover, Isabel is Amal's distant cousin, and the papers belonged to their mutual great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. Lugging with her a mysterious trunk of papers bequeathed to her by her mother, Isabel turns up at Omar's sister Amal's house in Cairo and explains that Omar had said she might be interested in translating the papers. Once in Egypt, Isabel neglects her project for a more personal investigation. But her interest in Egypt has more to do with her crush on Omar al-Ghamrawi, a passionate and difficult older Egyptian-American conductor and political writer, than with her work.
In 1997, Isabel Parkman, a recently divorced American journalist, travels to Egypt to research about the impending millennium. Coincidence-personal, political and cultural-rules in this burnished, ultra-romantic Booker Prize finalist.
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