From Cairo to the Gorbals

By Maggie Fergusson

CURRENT AFFAIRS Cairo, My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif, Bloomsbury, hardback, out now. In February 2011, while Ahdaf Soueif was reporting almost daily for the Guardian from Tahrir Square, her editor called from Bloomsbury. For years, she’d been contracted to write a book about Cairo, but every attempt had read “like an elegy”. Now she could write with hope. The result is an interweaving of tough, colourful, moment-to-moment reportage on the “18 golden days” that culminated in President Mubarak’s resignation, with memoir, journeys into the labyrinthine passages linking buildings in downtown Cairo, and reflections on how Mubarak’s regime managed, over 30 years, to destroy Egyptians’ sense of nationhood, setting Muslim against Christian and rich against poor. Soueif’s love of her city is intense, and infectious. She invites readers not simply to understand Cairo’s recent past, but to feel involved in its future.

NOVELLA The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, Fig Tree, hardback, out now. In a prequel to her acclaimed debut, which told the story of a Japanese-American family sent to an internment camp in 1942, Julie Otsuka explores the deracination of a shipment of Japanese “picture brides” who sailed into San Francisco in 1919. Escaping the drudgery of the paddy fields, and a culture of entrenched chauvinism, most find they have exchanged one hell for another. Their husbands submit them to sexual degradation and back-breaking toil; their children feel they belong nowhere; after Pearl Harbour, most are transported to camps in Utah. In eight linked narratives, Otsuka writes chiefly in the first person plural—“On the boat we were mostly virgins”—laying experiences one on another until they form an incantation: a restrained but vivid memorial to lives that left little trace.