These thirteen stories and a short novella by Salwa Bakr, one of Egypt’s most interesting and forthright woman writers of fiction, reveal an emerging talent of great power. Set among the poor and underprivileged of contemporary Cairo, the stories have as their protagonists women struggling to provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. They set out to explore the limits of self-awareness, the pressure to conform, and some of the strange paths to escape that women resort to in a conservative society shot through with social and sexual prejudice and preconceptions. Salwa Bakr rightly contends that Arabic literature has been the domain of men, that it is the task of women writing in Arabic to redress the balance, and that women’s writing has a positive role to play in freeing not only women but also men.

Salwa Bakr is the author of four volumes of short stories and four novels. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, and Dutch. She is married, has two children, and lives in an outer suburb of Cairo. Denys Johnson-Davies was born in Canada and grew up in Sudan and East Africa. Among his recent translations is Yahya Hakki’s The Lamp of Umm Hashim (AUC Press, 2004). He is the author of Memories in Translation: A Life between the Lines of Arabic Literature (AUC Press, 2006).