cairo (egypt)

When her mother has the chance to establish an eye clinic for the poor in Cairo, Egypt, seventeen-year-old Caroline reluctantly gives up her plans for a summer spent with her best friend and boyfriend and instead moves to Cairo, where she encounters a culture and city that enchant her and a charming boy who challenges her thoughts on love, faith, and privilege.

A study of women, poverty, and life in Cairo, as told through the words of Umm Ali, a member of the lower class who lives with her husband and eight children in a poor neighborhood, enduring a lack of money, little space, and often violence, with hope, dignity, and self-respect.

Presents a one-volume edition of the three novels in the Cairo Trilogy which follows three generations of the family of Muslim patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad during the British occupation of Egypt in the early years of the twentieth century.