Spirit of place | 21 January 2012

There are two ways of viewing the changes sweeping through the Arab world in general and Cairo in particular. There is the significance of individual events, such as the moment that the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight and lit the fuse on protests that brought down the government of President Ben Ali. And there is the bigger picture, one that looks back at the years of economic decline, decades of abuse, mismanagement and corruption. In this long awaited book, the London-based Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif gives us two very different views of individual events, a tale of two halves.

The larger and more successful part of the book is an account of Soueif’s involvement in the protests that began in Cairo on 25 January 2011 and led to the downfall of President Mubarak on 11 February. Soueif lives most of the year in London. On 25 January last year she was at the Jaipur Literary Festival, with little idea of what was about to happen.