"No one will ever understand what we have lived."
"And you, did you ?" <p/> Thus begins Gerald Messadié's new novel, his most intimate and revealing one. The setting is Cairo in the late forties and early fifties.
Life in Farouk's Egypt is pleasant and carefree. In the privileged circles where only English or French is spoken, suitors throw huge dinner parties by the Pyramids to court their ladies, and the royal families waltz in their palaces by the Nile. At the Guezira Sporting Club, Sybilla Hammerly, wife of a British diplomat, falls prey to a handsome Egyptian golden boy. The two Coptic daughters of a supercilious judge, Soussou and Nadia, give up reading their Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley novels for marriage: Soussou to a maharajah and Nadia to an impoverished revolutionary. Siegfried Alp, a trendy decorator, dallies with both an alcoholic British diplomat, Guy Burgess, and an aging movie actress, Margaret Harnell. This is the world of Isis, the goddess of love, a world of haunting fragrances and flowers in perpetual bloom, of sweltering heat, nakedness and luxury.
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Gerald Messadié is the author of more than thirty novels, scientific works and historical studies, many of them international best-sellers, from The Man Who Became God to Madame Socrates. 25 Soliman Pacha Street was largely inspired by the author's experience growing up in Egypt.
