The Shadow in the Backyard

The Shadow in the Backyard

Alexandria in the 1930s: a city between sea and desert, between cosmopolitan brilliance and hidden poverty, between colonial order and intellectual unrest. At its heart, Louis Schuler runs a small bookshop—an island of words, encounters, and quiet freedoms.

Surrounded by British officers, Egyptian students, artists, and banned books, Schuler’s shop becomes a meeting place where art, literature, and politics collide. Surrealism, Freud, Marx, Dostoyevsky—ideas that can liberate, and endanger. As surveillance tightens and informers draw closer, Schuler realizes that books are more than commodities: they are acts of resistance.

At the same time, memories surface—the loss of his wife, the underground cisterns of Alexandria, the sunken city beneath the sea—mirroring his struggle with truth and identity. What is visible deceives; what is hidden endures. The Shadow in the Backyard is a subtle historical novel about books as refuge, art as resistance, and a city whose light always casts shadows.

Charles Hohmann was born in Alexandria (Egypt) on 16 July 1947. He attended primary and secondary school in Alexandria, Abingdon (Great Britain) and Switzerland. He studied English and French literature at the University of Fribourg (i. Ue). In 1982, he did research for the English Department of Zürich University and wrote his doctoral thesis on the postmodern American author Thomas Pynchon. He was also a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago and the Oxford Royale Academy. He subsequently qualified in Switzerland as a Neurofeedback practitioner. In 2013 he founded his language school, the Tutorat Ägeri in Switzerland and retired in 2023. He lives in Thailand today, reading, writing and travelling, immersed in the mysteries of the Orient.