Cairo Circles
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2,3 • 3 valoraciones
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Descripción editorial
“Cairo Circles is a novel that proves literature needn’t choose between pleasure and substance. You will tear through the pages of this delicious book, and you will be changed in the process. Doma Mahmoud is a tremendous writer.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
Sherif “Sheero” Abdallah is an NYU student reveling in independence, free from the judgmental gaze of his conservative family in Egypt to indulge in all sorts of pleasures. When the FBI comes knocking on his door, he’s convinced it’s a case of mistaken identity—until they show him a picture of his cousin Amir. Amir has perpetrated a horrific attack and Sheero is suddenly forced to return to Cairo and confront the events that led to their wildly different circumstances.
While Amir wore Sheero’s hand-me-downs and suffered at the hands of neglectful, abusive parents, Sheero attended Cairo’s most prestigious high school, where he and his best friend Taymour, the son of one of Cairo’s business moguls, could enjoy sports clubs, beach vacations, high-end dining, and socializing with girls from the French and British schools. Once inseparable cousins, Sheero and Amir grew further apart, Amir ultimately having more in common with the children of Taymour’s housekeeper: Omar, Mustafa, and Zeina.
In Cairo Circles, the lives of this unforgettable group of six young Egyptians intertwine dramatically over the course of over a decade, revealing complex relationships dominated by faith, tradition, social class, and the boundaries of personal freedom. An epic, multi-perspective page-turner, Doma Mahmoud's debut introduces readers to a bold and inventive new voice in fiction as Cairo's streets burst to life on the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mahmoud's uneven debut explores the discrepancies of class and wealth in modern Cairo and the Egyptian diaspora through multiple strands of plot that jump back and forth in time and merge only tangentially. In mid-2000s New York City, wealthy Sheero, an undergraduate at NYU, is gleefully breaking every Muslim law in the book, doing lines of cocaine daily and living with his girlfriend, Carmen, a non-Muslim. Then his cousin Amir sets off a suicide bombing in the city's subway, killing several other people and leading the FBI to question Sheero. Mahmoud then shifts to Cairo several years earlier for a story involving Sheero's friend Taymour, whose housemaid's 11-year-old daughter, Zeina, vanishes, possibly kidnapped. As Zeina's younger twin brothers, Omar and Mustafa, grow up, their lives diverge, with Omar becoming a drug dealer and later a chauffeur for Taymour, and nerdy, depressed Mustafa studying mechanical engineering. Mahmoud explores the complexities of life in contemporary Cairo through the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. Individually, his characters are well developed, and his grasp of recent history is firm and illuminating. But almost every dramatic situation fizzles out, as the action becomes decreasingly credible and the narrative connections increasingly strained. It's an ambitious effort with many striking details of life, but it's undermined by its convoluted structure.
