Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1950. She is the eldest of three children from a father who was professor of psychology and a mother, professor emeritus of English literature at Cairo University, who later translated some of her daughter’s literary works. Ahdaf Soueif was educated in England and Egypt, where she obtained a BA degree in English Literature in 1971 from Cairo University and in 1973 an MA in English Literature from the American University in Cairo. In England she received a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Lancaster in 1978.

Ahdaf Soueif worked as an associate lecturer from 1971 to 1979 and then a lecturer from 1979 to 1984 at Cairo University and later as an associate professor at King Saud University in Riyadh from 1987 to 1989. Back to London in 1989 she found employment at Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation. She is a novelist and also a political and cultural commentator. She writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper in London and has a weekly column in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Shorouk. She writes mainly in English but also in Arabic.

Ahdaf Soueif received the Cavafy award in 2011 and the Mahmoud Darwish Award in 2010. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999 for her fourth novel, The Map Of Love, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages. She was also awarded for Sandpiper by the Cairo International Book Fair Best Collection of Short Stories in 1996 and was shortlisted in 1983 for the Guardian Fiction Prize for her novel, Aisha.

Ahdaf Soueif wrote and published Aisha in 1983, In The Eye Of The Sun in 1992, Sandpiper in 1996 and The Map Of Love in 1999. In 2003 her translation from Arabic to English of I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti was published; then in 2004, Mezzaterra followed by I Think Of You in 2007 and Cairo My City, Our Revolution in 2012.

Ahdaf Soueif was married and has two sons from the late Ian Hamilton, the British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher. She lives between Cairo and London.

The Map Of Love, despite its unfortunate and misleading title, is a political, historical story sprinkled with romanticism, written originally in English and endearingly dotted with Egyptian colloquialisms. The story begins at the end of the 19th century and continues throughout the 20th. The events take place in London, Cairo and New York, where the past connects with the present and when history tends to repeat itself.

It’s the story of the complex history of Egypt during a whole turbulent century of its awakening, its aspirations, revolts and resistance to adversities. The author mentions names of several Egyptian heroes such as the nationalist colonel, Ahmed Orabi, the loyalist, Mustafa Kamel Pasha, the patriot Mohammed Farid and many others who were all fighting, each in his own way, to free their beloved country from the weakened Ottoman rulers who had occupied Egypt for centuries and had been superseded by the colonialist British Empire from 1882 to 1956.

One of the main characters is the newly widowed, Anna Winterbourne who leaves England for Egypt in 1900. Anna falls in love with Egypt as well as with the Egyptian nationalist, Sharif Basha al-Baroudi. She doesn’t know then that nearly a century later, her great granddaughter, Isabel Parkman, the young American divorced journalist living in New York, will fall in love with the handsome world-renowned, half Egyptian half Palestinian, pianist and conductor, Omar-al-Ghamrawi.

Although, nearly a century apart, Sharif Basha al-Baroudi as well as his great grand nephew, Omar-al-Ghamrawi, have four things in common: they share the same blood, they are both charismatic well-known figures, both in love with western women and they both fight strongly for their political beliefs. Sharif Basha wants to free Egypt from the British occupation and a century later Omar is fighting for the Palestinian cause in the Middle East. The depiction of Sharif and Anna’s love mirrored many decades later by Omar and Isabel’s is intentional by the author, as a proof that love transcends time, place and culture.

When in 1997 Isabel discovers an old trunk in her dying mother’s home containing Anna’s diary and letters written in English and Layla’s diary written in Arabic, she informs Omar, in order to get him interested in her and win his attention. Omar is much older than Isabel and has a difficult character. He is divorced and has two children and advises her to see his sister Amal in Cairo who might be willing to translate the Arabic diary and papers for her.

Isabel goes to Cairo. Amal accepts the task and while working to unravel the history of Anna and Layla through the written material and trinkets in hand, Amal discovers that she has common ancestry with Isabel. The story of Anna unfolds gradually but at the same time is intercepted by other stories that are happening a hundred years later. The past and the present run in a harmonious parallel throughout this family saga.

The Map Of Love is compassionately written with an Egyptian spirit, wit and sensibility, the author showing a good historical knowledge and a strong political opinion. The novel provides rich insights into Egyptian political, cultural and social life during all of the twentieth century including some history of the Palestinian and Israeli problem.

In one in her interviews, Ahdaf Soueif says: “The genre I work in is the ‘realistic’ novel. So my characters live in a specific time and a specific place in our real world. And in that time and place things happen – political things or public things, if you like. And they affect the characters and the characters in turn strive to affect them.”

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Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973. His father, a highly qualified chemist who could not find work in England in the seventies, moved with his family to Cameroon, west Africa, where he built a Guinness brewery. Chris Cleave spent part of his childhood there and was back in England when he was eight years old. He first went to Hillingdon state school in London and continued his studies in Buckinghamshire, followed by psychology studies at Balliol College, Oxford.

Cleave, who is a novelist and was a columnist for the Guardian newspaper from 2008 to 2010, has worked as a barman, a long distance sailor and a marine navigation teacher.

He lives in Kingston-Upon-Thames near London with his French wife and three children.

Chris Cleave has written two novels to date plus Gold to be published in June 2012:
Incendiary, published in 2005 was adapted into a feature film.
The Other Hand, published in 2008 and will soon be adapted into a film.
He has also written three short stories: Quiet Time. Fresh Water and Oyster.

Cleave’s first novel, Incendiary, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2006 and was short-listed for the 2006 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. In 2008 he was short-listed for the Costa Book Awards in the novel category for his second novel, The Other Hand (Little Bee).

The Other Hand was influenced by Cleave’s childhood in Cameroon. The novel is narrated by the two main characters, Sarah and Little Bee, each one with her own side of the story. The two of them met two years ago for the first time, on a beach in Nigeria in atrocious circumstances. Despite their difference in age and culture, they have in common the aspiration for a peaceful and happy life.

Sarah is an English, hard-working young woman. She is editor of a glossy, women’s magazine called Nixie and is married to the journalist, Andrew O’Rourke. They have a four-year-old child called Charlie, who dresses and carries on as the fictional super-hero character, Batman. They all live in Kingston-upon-Thames. Sarah is unhappy in her wedlock and commits adultery with Lawrence, a Home Office press officer, who is also unhappily married.

As for Udo, she has changed her name to Little Bee and has managed to escape the horror, violence and corruption in her native Nigeria, caused by big oil company exploitation, by seeking asylum in England. Little Bee’s sense of humour and wit is kept intact at all times, even at the worst moments, which helps to keep her going through all the hardships she has to endure. In fact she is quite hilarious often, creating some sort of comic relief, lightening the serious theme of the novel.

In his novel, the author tackles modern, world-wide, important problems: the immigration, the shameful treatment of asylum seekers and how they are sent to their ineluctable deaths. The reader is immersed in the subject right from the first pages of the novel, which starts in the immigration detention centre in Essex, England, where the main character, Little Bee, is detained for two years following her stowaway arrival from Nigeria on a tea cargo ship.

She succeeds in escaping thanks to a clever stratagem orchestrated by a Jamaican girl who is also an asylum seeker and who manages to rescue three girls with her from incarceration without any legal papers. From this point, the whole story unfolds in snippets, the mystery of sixteen-year-old Little Bee and the shocking encounter with the O’Rourke couple, Sarah and Andrew in Nigeria.

Throughout the novel the author transports us from sunny, warm, corrupt and violent Nigeria, whose delta inhabitants are killed because they happen to be living on the unexplored, rich oil area, to the cold, grey, mundane life in England. The contrast is stunning in every respect between the two different worlds of fortunate and unfortunate people who both suffer in different ways. The two existences portrayed in a captivating and moving way.

There is also the underlining of the choices that some people have to make in life. Sarah had to sacrifice her middle finger to save Little Bee’s life, but on the other hand, while in a panic, she thoughtlessly asked Little Bee to contact the police to come and search for her missing, four-year-old son, Charlie. This ended in having Little Bee uncovered and arrested by the same police officers she had called to the rescue. Little Bee, who is young and innocent, makes the choice of fleeing her country to escape from the killers who are after her. As for Andrew O’Rourke, who is suffering from deep depression, he chooses to commit suicide which is helped by the reappearance of Little Bee.

The story’s end is intense and effective, conveying a powerful message. This is doubtless deliberate on the part of the author in order to awaken the human compassion and sense of decency in the hope of provoking a positive reaction and not having his missive lost like a scream in the desert.