25 RUE SOLIMAN PACHA

Thus begins Gerald Messadié's new novel, his most intimate and revealing one. The setting is Cairo in the late forties and early fifties.
Life in Farouk's Egypt is pleasant and carefree. In the privileged circles where only English or French is spoken, suitors throw huge dinner parties by the Pyramids to court their ladies, and the royal families waltz in their palaces by the Nile. At the Guezira Sporting Club, Sybilla Hammerly, wife of a British diplomat, falls prey to a handsome Egyptian golden boy. The two Coptic daughters of a supercilious judge, Soussou and Nadia, give up reading their Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley novels for marriage: Soussou to a maharajah and Nadia to an impoverished revolutionary. Siegfried Alp, a trendy decorator, dallies with both an alcoholic British diplomat, Guy Burgess, and an aging movie actress, Margaret Harnell. This is the world of Isis, the goddess of love, a world of haunting fragrances and flowers in perpetual bloom, of sweltering heat, nakedness and luxury.
Suddenly the dream is shattered. Cairo is burning and foreigners are massacred by wild fanatical mobs. When Farouk abdicates and a junta takes over, the world discovers another Egypt, a leftist Islamic country with hard-labour camps run by strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. The gallant company of yesterday must now flee, carrying with them the heaviest baggage of all: nostalgia and the memory of paradise lost. Those who escape to London, Paris and New York confront for the first time the harsh realities of life in exile.

Gerald Messadié is the author of more than thirty novels, scientific works and historical studies, many of them international best-sellers, from The Man Who Became God to Madame Socrates. 25 Soliman Pacha Street was largely inspired by the author's experience growing up in Egypt.