The tales in this intriguing debut collection have more in common than their Egyptian setting.
Anne-Marie Drosso has a simple, open prose style and is good at pinpointing moments of emotional resonance in her characters’ lives.
At their best, her stories draw memorable pictures: an anxious couple forgetting their petty row and embracing during a spell of midair turbulence; a mother throwing herself on the ground to protect her baby daughter from oncoming traffic.
Yet stories with more overtly emotive content are, paradoxically, less successful. In one of these, following a car accident involving the woman he has loved since childhood, a man rushes to
reach her bedside before she
dies; elsewhere, a young girl’s mother returns home dazed and unable to recognise her daughter’s face. Despite their interesting premises, these stories are curiously uninvolving.
Drosso’s writing can be rather clunky at times, and although the stories in this collection span some 50 years, they only ever give a very spare sense of the city that gives the book its name. Atmospheric touches are few and far between, and while such details don’t seem necessary in the sharper stories, their absence in the weaker ones
is noticeable.
