Voices (Hardcover)

Hamid Ibn-Mustafa Al-Bahairi left the village of his birth at the age of ten and went to seek his fortune in Europe. Paris made him rich, and he is now a successful business man, married to an educated cosmopolitan French woman. But when he decides to visit his original family home in the eastern region of the Nile Delta, he unwittingly condemns both his wife and the village to become locked in a series of frustrating and disturbing encounters - cultural, religious and emotional - which are politely glossed over at first, until they finally become the makings of grim tragedy. Told through the voices of the principal local protagonists in this tense drama (the officials, Hamid and his brother, the fiercely jealous women, the only French-speaking villager - but never the visiting Simone), Voices gives an objective but deeply compassionate glimpse of people's lives thrown into confusion. The familiar and the strange continually press upon each other as the villagers struggle to come to terms with what was originally intended to be the joyful return of a favorite son.