LOVE FOR LIVRES

0710

Publisher presentation:the author of the highly-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building returns with a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition set in Chicago with a cast of American and Arab characters achingly human in their desires and needs. Egyptian and American lives collide on a college campus in post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound in this extraordinary and eagerly anticipated new novel from Alaa al Aswany. Among the players are a sixties-style antiestablishment professor whose relationship with a younger African American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance a veiled PhD candidate whose conviction in the principles of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society an émigré whose fervent desire to embrace his American identity is tested when he is faced with the issue of his daughter's honor an Egyptian informant who spouts religious doctrines while hankering after money and power and a dissident student poet who comes to America to finance his literary aspirations, but whose experience in Chicago turns out to be more than he bargained for.