In Egypt a new era has dawned, but the dawn has taken an ominous turn. President Gamal Abdel Nasser has just proclaimed the first in a series of nationalization decrees, the stock exchange has shut down, and its parking attendant, Sayyid, is staring at penury. Across the street, the office of the Ministry's Supervisory Board of Administrative Organization is engulfed in an eerie silence, and the narrator, one of the two remaining fulltime occupants of that nearly defunct government office, has fallen desperately in love with the other, Doha-forceful, erudite, and, a complete enigma.The narrator helps Sayyid find a job in the janitorial staff of the Ministry and then watches in amazement as he pursues avenues for career advancement and political participation that would never have been open to him before the Revolution, avenues that the narrator himself has lost interest in. And soon he is thrown much closer together with Doha: a ministerial study grant comes through that enables them to attend an administrative training program in Rome, and there Doha reveals to him other aspects of her mysterious nature, including a spiritual bond to the Egyptian goddess Aset, before suddenly and inexplicably cutting him adrift.As the narrator struggles with rejection, we glimpse some of the ills of the post-revolutionary order: suppression of freedoms, corruption, ideological witch hunts, a disastrous intervention in Yemen. But As Doha Said is less about a revolution's dreams turned sour than about awakening. A sophisticated, richly textured novel, it combines a realistic weft of events and deftly depicted characters that undergo subtle mutations-and, indeed, amputations-with a warp of mythical and historical iconography, a weave that allows the author to explore such themes as apathy and despair, courage and self-sacrifice, ambition and temptation, disillusionment and political faith, and, above all, commitment and betrayal, and to lift them to a universal, almost metaphysical level.

This brief, beautifically crafted novel introduces one of the finest contemporary Arab novelists to English-speaking audiences. In it, Bahaa' Taher, one of a group of Egyptian writers - including the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz - noted for their revealing portraits of Egyptian life and society, tells the dramatic story of a young Muslim who, when his life is threatened, finds sanctuary in a community of Coptic monks. It is a tale of honor and of the terrible demands of blood vengeance; it probes the question of how a people or nation can become divided against itself. Taher has a magical gift for evoking the village life of Upper Egypt - a vastly different setting than urban Cairo and a landscape that tourists usually glimpse only from the windows of trains and buses taking them to the Pharaonic sites. Here, where Christians and Muslims have coexisted peacefully for centuries, where the traditions of the Coptic Church are as powerful as those of the Muslims, Taher crafts an intricate and compelling tale of far-reaching implications. With a powerful narrative voice and a genius for capturing the complex nuances of human interaction, Taher brilliantly depicts the poignant drama of a traditional society caught up in the process of change.