Spring

A Novel

De: Leila Rafei

Narrado por: Negin Farsad

Three stories. One revolution. Eighteen days in Egypt.

Sami is no revolutionary. When the Arab Spring breaks out in 2011, he’s busy finishing school in Cairo and hiding his relationship with an American woman from his conservative mother, Suad. It’s a task that’s becoming impossible as events take a catastrophic turn.

But Suad won’t be fooled - her son has been distant, and she knows it’s not about politics. Far away in the Nile Delta, she spends her days tending obsessively to her lemon grove, which is quickly becoming her last vestige of control. The only child who remains by her side is her daughter, but as she, too, gets involved with the protests, Suad realizes it won’t last for long.

There’s one person who knows exactly what’s going on in the family, and she wishes she didn’t. The maid, Jamila, already has too much to worry about as a refugee who’s lobbying for resettlement, expecting a baby, and looking for her missing husband. All she wants is stability, and that her dreams won’t be thwarted by the unrest sweeping a city she doesn’t belong to - a city that doesn’t even want her there.

As the country revolts against the regime it has always known, Jamila, Sami, and Suad find themselves caught in the whirlwind as they examine their own life choices and, in some cases, deal with the inevitable heartbreak that follows when revolution is not always what it seems.

©2020 Leila Rafei (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Reseñas de la Crítica

2020 BuzzFeed Books Pick

2020 Apple Best Book of the Month

a gripping, true story, in fiction

When journalisting, I find that—counterintuitively—the underlying truth about a big, cataclysmic event often reveals itself most clearly at its edges, at the "rim of chaos," so to speak, where the impacts spun off from the molten hot core of a disaster, scandal, election, protest, etc. smack into the reality of everyday people. Leila Rafei's novel SPRING is that, times a thousand. It's also one of the finest examples I've ever seen of how fiction can reveal the truth with more power and clarity than non-fiction ever could. Like millions of us around the world, I closely followed the events at Cairo's Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring a decade ago. I've read idk how many articles about it all since then. None told the truth about those heady days the way these interlocking stories do.