As a flight from Dubai comes into London's Heathrow and hits turbulence, four people from different corners of the Arab world are thrown together: beautiful, lost Lamis, recently divorced from her wealthy Iraqi husband; Nicholas, an expert at Southeby's on Islamic daggers; louche and noisy Amira, a Moroccan who lives off immoral earnings and the transvestite Samir, with a monkey hidden in a basket. Landing safely they go their separate ways, but from then on they find their lives are intimately entwined. ONLY IN LONDON is a funny, tender and sexy novel that uncovers a unique world in the heart of a big city.
Hanan al-Shaykh was born in 1945 and grew up in Beirut. She is the author of five novels including BEIRUT BLUES, three of which have been translated into English. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages and they are banned from many Arab countries because of their sexual explicitness. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Title: Only In London
Author: Al-Shaykh, Hanan
ISBN: 9781408801925
Binding:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 2009-06-15
Number of Pages: 288
Weight: 0.2223 kg
'A fresh, amusing and surprising take on London, and on life' The Times 'An exquisitely comic tale of self-reinvention and survival' Guardian 'Devastatingly entertaining fiction ... teeming with ideas: memory and exile, language, desire and identity, and the search for order in the chaos of a metropolis' Literary Review 'A wittily sympathetic story about an England that tolerates but never quite accepts exotic foreigners' Sunday Times