"She passed him the last glass of tea and put the kettle to one side. She pulled out the black shawl from above a basket behind her. She shook it out and let it remain on her outstretched leg. He wanted to say that too many years had passed. It seemed she had noticed something on his face. Her look was fleeting and she inclined her head toward the coals. "I used to say you were different from your father. . . ." "Highly regarded by critics and fellow writers in Cairo, El-Bisatie is a 'writer's writer'--which is to say a writer who makes no concessions to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted: the menace lurks almost unseen between the lines." --from the Introduction by Denys Johnson-Davies.

Mohamed El-Bisatie's first collection of short stories was published in Arabic in 1968. Since then, he has written five more volumes of short stories and four novellas. Born and raised in the Nile Delta, he now lives in Cairo. Denys Johnson-Davies has been described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time." He has published more than twenty volumes of short stories, novels, plays, and poetry translated from modern Arabic literature. He now lives in Morocco.