“Lush, sensuous, unabashedly romantic, and richly drawn, Jasmin Attia’s The Oud Player of Cairo evokes with passion and precision a bygone world, a culture’s struggle, and one extraordinary woman’s erotic and political awakenings.
The Oud Player of Cairo
Vibrantly descriptive and evocative of the waning colonial world in Egypt during the mid-20th century, this debut historical novel by Jasmin Attia is the compelling story of a young Egyptian woman, Laila, who defies the restrictive traditional roles set for women of that time, and instead follows the path inspired by her musician father, a much-beloved oud player, to become a singer and performer in her own right.
“A novel that's both emotionally rich and scrupulously researched, The Oud Player of Cairo evokes a vanished time and place: The last years of colonial Egypt, a city and a nation on the precipice of colossal change. This book is about music and love and family bonds, about a complex society that battles over wealth and power and privilege, about an individual woman's struggle to chart her own path through the world. It's brilliantly rendered. Twenty-two years pass over the course of its pages, but those decades feel like the blink of an eye.