Caroline's Reviews > The Map of Love

Oh man. This one's a keeper. This is one of those books I know I'm going to come back to again and again. I loved it. Loved it so much I can hardly even put it into words. And to think I bought it from a charity shop and it's been sat on my shelves this past four years! It's about Lady Anna, an aristocratic English widow who goes to Egypt in 1901 and falls in love with Sharif Basha al-Baroudi, so I suppose it's a classic desert romance but it's so much more than that - there are twin storylines following Anna and Sharif in turn-of-the-century Egypt and then their descendants on the eve of the millennium, and it's about the the Occupation of Egypt and the British Empire and the British, French, Arabic and Jewish politics and the conflict between cultures. But oh, I loved it. This is one of the books you actually fall in love with, you know? A real keeper.