Letters from Cairo

A woman recounts her adventures in Egypt, the Middle East, and beyond in this absorbing memoir.

 


Imbued with a love of travel and adventure as a child through books her parents bought her during the Great Depression, Anne Speake would eventually go on to journey to many destinations in her adult life, from Paris to Thailand to Greece—but she particularly fell in love with the Middle East, especially the city of Cairo—to which she's returned at least thirty times over the decades.


 


This memoir of her times in Egypt, from sailing the Nile to visiting with the Sadats to living for a while in her beloved Cairo—as well as trips to Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Israel and more—is an in-depth, wide-ranging account of a well-traveled life that also provides a close-up view of late-twentieth-century history in the region, as well as the ways the Middle East has changed, and the ways it hasn't, over time.