The House of the Coptic Woman is intelligent, complex and rich.”—Arab News
“A provocative story of religious strife, justice, and tragedy. . . with a tinge of macabre humor. . . unnerving, and courageous.”—The New Arab
“People's houses mysteriously burn, lands change hands and old grudges are never settled. . . . This can be seen as a disquieting novel. It is primarily a portrait of how hard it can be to be human in the midst of other human beings who don't know how to live and let live.”—Daily Kos
"These are credible characters and they really ground the story of upheaval and conflict, giving it heft and poignancy, elegantly told, slowly building on the passion behind the story."—Crime Time FM
“[An] intricate legal drama. Two disparate narrators—a public prosecutor and a brutalized runaway woman—take turns relating the events in Upper Egypt, where religion-driven politics engender antagonism and violence. . . . . El-Ashmawi's fiction proves to be a sobering exposé of the multilayered abuses of ominous power.”—Shelf Awareness
"Captivating yet painful, this story unfolds like a beautiful mosaic around the entrance of an abandoned palace.”—Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, author of Clouds Over Alexandria
“This masterpiece will remain one of the best Arabic novels of the past fifty years and it shall live for another fifty years.”—Amad
“This excellent book shows incredible courage . . . fast-paced and very realistic. The novel is a cry against injustice.”—Shorouk
“Ashraf El-Ashmawi breaks down the three deep-seated taboos in Arab writing: religion, sex, and politics.”—Reuters (Arabic edition)
"Ashmawi drills deep into the soul of Egypt. Reminiscent of Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, The House of the Coptic Woman uncovers a complex web of religious conflict, abuse of power, and competition over land in the crammed Nile Valley."—Magdi Abdelhadi
"An allegorical tale of religious strife. . . . Much of the story can be read as a thinly veiled critique of the last years of the Mubarak regime, marked by sectarian violence and official corruption."—Kirkus Reviews
“Full of pain, tears, and blood, as well as the bitterness of broken dreams, this book fires a warning shot, drawing our attention to the absence of justice, law, and freedom.”—al-Ahram
“[A] creative testimony to one of the darkest, most bitter chapters in modern history.”—al-Masry al-Youm
PRAISE FOR EL-ASHMAWI'S PREVIOUS NOVEL, THE LADY OF ZAMALEK:
"A grand family drama set in a society at once strange and familiar, rife with surprise revelations that keep the reader fully engaged. . . .It deserves to be a bestseller."—Washington Independent Review of Books
"There's something very compelling about opening a book to read about a place you've never visited before, from the eyes of an author who knows it well." —LitReactor
"Set in the confines of one toxic family as its members, over decades, perpetually attempt to outmaneuver one another, the narrative creates a sense of vicious hopelessness. In the family, as, it’s implied, the country around them, this cycle swallows all; even acts of extreme insurrection feed back into a negative cycle."—LitHub
"The sweep of Egyptian history and the portrait of class, social norms, and values are fascinating."—Historical Novels Review
"A brilliantly spun tale. . . playing with politics and powerful people. El-Ashmawi paints a story where money comes and goes, power changes hands, and where both can disappear in an instant."—Arab News
"A bold attempt to reimagine not only the transformations of the Zamalek district of Cairo, but also those of the Egyptian nation itself."—al-Dostoor
"Ashraf El-Ashmawy holds a scalpel to dissect the classes of Egyptian society over more than half a century.” —al-Youm al-Sabe'
2023-08-12
Egyptian novelist and jurist El-Ashmawi delivers an allegorical tale of religious strife in a desert backwater.
Tayea Village isn’t much of a place, as Nader Fayez Kamal discovers on arriving. The most interesting thing about the farming backwater is its name, which honors a former mayor but which the inhabitants mispronounce: “They called it Tayha, as in the lost soul, instead of the obedient one.” The “lost soul” sobriquet is fitting, for, explains a villager with the redolent name of Ramses Iskander, the house in which Nader, a public prosecutor, has been billeted is said to be haunted by the ghost of a British colonial officer, and in the wake of the resulting curse some of its previous Muslim inhabitants abandoned the town, which was then settled by Christians. One such lost soul wanders into Tayea about the same time Nader does, a woman named Hoda Yusef Habib, who, raped by her stepfather, has been married off to a brutish, abusive older man. Now a widow—or so she thinks—Hoda assumes a Coptic identity and hides in open sight, in the bargain revealing healing powers reminiscent of the biblical tale of Lazarus. Those powers don’t extend to keeping peace between Christians and Muslims, however, and El-Ashmawi’s story becomes one of grinding vendettas, lawsuits, and murders, with a leavening of sardonic magic realism in the vein more of Dürrenmatt than García Márquez. Much of the story can be read as a thinly veiled critique of the last years of the Mubarak regime, marked by sectarian violence and official corruption. The characters are too thinly developed to carry much weight. Nader, though committed to justice, is both weak and shallow: He carries a gun without bullets and lives in fear of a call from his distant but demanding fiancee, while Hoda, strong and resolute, pays a terrible price “simply because she wanted to live,” an outcome that can be predicted well before the book’s end.
Of some interest to readers of contemporary Arabic literature.
