Escape to Aswan

Amal Sedky-Winter

Description

On a brief visit to Cairo to support an investigation her fiancé, a Jewish American journalist, has undertaken, Salma is caught up in the machinations of a new, radical Islamist group with a vendetta against her father, a man with his own dark side. A former lover and Islamist, kidnaps her. He forces her to flee with him from Cairo to Aswan in the far south of Egypt. As they navigate the  backroads, Salma, a privileged Egyptian-American, finds herself hiding under a burqa, running desert sandstorms and relying on the goodwill of poor villagers.

A page-turner, Escape to Aswan is not only a political thriller but a dramatic telling of the clashes of culture and class in the Arab world. 

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Refugees
• Cultural Heritage
• World Literature
• Egipto
• Egypt
• Travel
• Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: Cune Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781614574408
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

"Having read books from every region of the world except the Middle East, Escape to Aswan opened up a whole new world of intrigue for me."
Jim McDermott, U.S. Congressman (ret)
"The character of Salma is the main strength of this novel, showing a bicultural woman caught between the superficiality of American life and the richness and rigidity of Egyptian culture, "seeing both sides and belonging to neither." An international adventure tale that effectively works as a study of the contrast between Western and Arabic cultures."
Kirkus Reviews
"A tour de force! A suspense thriller, an action movie, a travelogue, a social commentary. A complex love affair, and for me, a remembrance of things past."
Carol Ruth Clark, Egypt Tours
"You know you have stepped into a different world from the first page. As the pages turn you can’t put it down, and then you are gripping the book and starting to wonder who the good guys are and who are the bad ones. When the book ends your first question is "Where is the sequel?"
Margaret McCormack, Geography and Middle East Lecturer, Butte College. California
"This culturally complex thriller features multilayered characters and tense action... The characters are complex, and Sedky-Winter avoids genre stereotypes by rendering messy but relatable relationships torn between any number of options..."
Booklife Review

Escape to Aswan
A Novel
© 2023 Amal Sedky Winter
Cune Press, Seattle 2023
First Edition
Hardback ISBN 9781951082741
Paperback ISBN 9781951082581
EPUB ISBN 9781614574408
Kindle ISBN 9781614579816
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sedky Winter, Amal, author.
Title: Escape to Aswan : a novel / Amal Sedky Winter.
Description: [Seattle] : Cune, [2023] | Identifiers: LCCN 2022017831 (print) | LCCN 202201 (ebook) | ISBN 9781951082581 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781614574408 (epub)
Subjects:
Classification: LCC PS3619.E3444 E83 2023 (print) | LCC PS3619.E3444 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20220523
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017831
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017832

Cune Press: www.cunepress.com | www.cunepress.net
DEDICATION
This novel is dedicated to my late husband, my muse and mentor, William David Winter and to the Egyptian women we both admired
Part I
They [the Egyptians] were a joyous folk, and it seemed their faces were the first rays of the dawning sun. So let the journey end here, let it end with those four verses. Remember them, and them alone, when they’re throwing you into Cairo Airport’s "detention room."
Najwan Darwish (Palestinian poet) (1978–) Exhausted on the Cross
Chapter 1
Monday September 29, 2014 2:45 pm
"A TTENTION ." T HE WORD POPPED ACROSS THE AIRPLANE movie screen. Salma pulled out her ear buds. This was her first trip to Cairo since bringing her two recalcitrant teenage daughters to visit her family three years ago.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot," a disembodied voice filled the cabin. "Cairo air traffic control has redirected us to the old terminal." That got Salma’s attention. Things would be messy. Who would handle her passport if her cousin didn’t know of the change?
"You may collect your luggage there." She really didn’t want to handle luggage alone. Not in the old terminal. "Air France ground personnel will meet you to answer questions after you disembark," the pilot continued. "We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for flying Air France."
Salma had delayed the start of the sociology classes she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came up with a way to join her fiancé, Paul, in Cairo without scandalizing her family by appearing to accompany him. She submitted a paper based on a sociological study she’d directed: The effects of Islamophobia on American children of Arab heritage. The research paper had little to do with the theme of the Conference on Counterterrorism, but the conference panel chair had been Salma’s schoolmate at the Cairo British Academy twenty years ago, so naturally, she invited Salma to present it. Things worked that way in Egypt.
She steadied herself against the arm rest to look out the window at the Nile flowing south to north from Aswan to Alexandria, the length of the country, slicing through the largest non-Arctic expanse of desert in the world. Twenty years ago, her high school class took a trip to the ancient temples of Aswan, but because of her up-coming marriage to ex-president Mubarak’s nephew, Salma’s parents had not allowed her to join. In fact, except for airplane trips to the condo in Sharm el Sheikh, she’d never been south of Cairo. Perhaps she and Paul could go to Upper Egypt. Not this time. Maybe next. She watched the desert’s colors transform from indistinguishable grey to gradations of ochre yellow sand as the plane descended, struck once more by the dramatic demarcation between the arid yellow sand and the deep-green strip of irrigated land that spread into the lotus-shaped delta anchored at Cairo, on its way to the Mediterranean Sea. She felt the plane circling and looked out at a forest of satellite dishes mounted on rooftops covered with debris fortifications meant to hold her at bay as they prepared to land.
Pausing at the top of the airplane’s metal stairway, she slipped on her sunglasses to fend off the harsh glare of the Egyptian sun. Thick air wrapped itself around her body and seeped into her pores as she surveyed the familiar landscape. This moment of return insisted on being absorbed: air sodden with industrial effluence, field manure, carbon monoxide, the boil of heat from the tarmac, the bleached-white sky. This wasn’t her favorite time of day, here. Cairo was at its best at night. She loved the short route to the art classes she took in her teens with neon strips outlining the facades of stalls she walked past awash in fluorescent lights. Yellow phosphorescent lights in apartment windows. Strings of colored bulbs across the alleys off the main road. Adjusting her carry-on shoulder strap, Salma started down the stairs.
Something was wrong.
She felt it like static activating the tiny hairs on her arms.
Humvees on the tarmac? Machine guns atop Jeeps? Soldiers at the airport?
There were always soldiers at the airport though never this many. Some on the rooftops in desert camouflage fatigues. More lined up in the building’s thin shade.
Had the Muslim Brotherhood moved against Egypt’s president, the Rayyis? Perhaps a radical Islamist had assassinated him. Couldn’t be. It would have been all over CNN. So, what kind of disaster was she walking into?
She headed across the tarmac to the terminal, worried the oven hot asphalt would melt the soles of her sandals, her father’s voice in her head, "Why aren’t you wearing decent shoes?" After twenty years of growing into adulthood in California, visits to her upper-class family in Egypt had become challenging. She found the social structure oppressive, family obligations were weighty, and her father was maddeningly controlling. She didn’t want her family to know she and Paul planned to marry until she’d felt them out.
Still brooding, she reached the entrance of the one-story terminal building where two rows of soldiers stood guard with shouldered machine guns. So much for a better Egypt after Tahrir. Once inside the old arrival hall, whose air conditioner had already succumbed to the heat, she looked around for her cousin, Mokhtar. He had to be here soon. He’d never stood her up before. Always escorted her to the VIP lounge, took her passport, and handled her visa while she sipped from the water-bottle he’d brought. But he wasn’t here today. No matter how awkward it felt to stand in line with non-Egyptian citizen passengers, that’s what she’d have to do.
Salma wasn’t a foreign passenger. She’d been born in Cairo, lived there until she was seventeen when she married and went to college in the States. Yes, her mother was American, but her father was Egyptian, and she thought of herself as half and half. Now her Egyptian half screamed, "What about me? You should be embarrassed standing in a line for foreigners." But Salma had never taken out an Egyptian passport. She’d always travelled on an American one for which many countries didn’t insist on visas.
Concentrating on the line she stood in, she looked beyond the passport control kiosk for her cousin, again, until she reached the head of the queue. Still, no sign of him. She stood behind the yellow line on the floor wondering how going through Egyptian immigration on her own would work. The man behind her cleared his throat to hurry her along. Half a dozen butterflies trembled in her stomach as she stepped up to the control booth to hand her passport to its agent.
" Amrikeya? " The tone jolted her. Coming from this uniformed official, it was more an accusation than a question. "Step to the side," the jowly man ordered. "Let the others pass." A bad sign. His contempt was palpable; she smelled his spite the odor that small people in positions of impotent authority exude. Salma knew her father could terrify this man with a single word, but she wasn’t about to call him. He couldn’t tolerate her choosing to be American. As far as Hani Hamdi was concerned, Salma’s choice meant she was siding with her mother against him, betraying him and his country Salma’s real country. The one where she was born. He didn’t care how much she appreciated having the right to free speech and assembly and that the American embassy quickly replaced the passports she’d lost when she traveled to the Middle East to train Arab women in political empowerment. None of this made a difference to her father.
She leaned against the thick chain corralling the kiosk and waited for the officer to call her back. Maybe she could reach Paul. Scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Conference on Counterterrorism in two days, he’d gotten into Cairo last night. Salma shifted uncomfortably at the thoug