Chicago: A Novel - Softcover

Al Aswany, Alaa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061452580 ISBN 13: 9780061452581

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

Egyptian and American lives collide on a college campus in post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound in the extraordinary second novel from the highly acclaimed author of The Yacoubian Building. This is a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition, pulsating and alive with a rich and unforgettable cast of American and Arab characters who are achingly human in their desires and needs. Beautifully rendered, this is an illuminating portrait of America, a complex, often contradictory land in which triumph and failure, opportunity and oppression, small dramas and big dreams coexist. Chicago is a powerfully engrossing novel of culture and individuality from one of the most original voices in contemporary world literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Alaa Al Aswany is the internationally bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago. A journalist who writes a controversial opposition column, Al Aswany makes his living as a dentist in Cairo.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Aswany came to Chicago from Egypt in the late 1980s to attend the University of Illinois. A practicing dentist in Cairo, he became a best-selling novelist with The Yacoubian Building (2002), about the occupants of a Cairo apartment building. In his newest galvanizing novel, he creates another galaxy of lives, this time transforming the medical school at the University of Illinois into a seething microcosm of contentious politics, religious beliefs, and ambitions. Marshaling a magnetic cast of professors, Egyptian émigrés with American wives and children, and Egyptian students on visas and in culture shock, Aswany, using alternating points of view, uncoils a dramatic yet darkly hilarious plot involving imperiled marriages and covert political activity. Neatly smashing any notion of monolithic ethnicity and contrasting extreme ideology with determined morality, Aswany also expresses deep compassion for women, especially in the stories of  two lonely, pious students and that of a desperately job-seeking black woman married to a white professor. Brilliant and forthright in his insights into sexuality, racism, and tyranny; empathic in his psychological intensity; and righteous in his protest of covert post-9/11 brutality and injustice, Aswany has written a daring novel of our delusions and dreams, vulnerabilities and strengths. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0061452580
• ISBN 13: 9780061452581
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352