The author of Days in Diaspora has written several books of law and public administration as well as a novel, Exhausted Hearts (2005), which won the State Encouragement Prize. This novel focuses on a phase in the life of its protagonist as he is torn between his Jewish mother and the Muslim relatives of his father, who was killed in the Suez war before the hero was even born, after which the hero travels to France with his mother to live with his Jewish family. Days in Diaspora is one of the very few novels to address the tangled topic—often passed over in silence—of the impact of the Arab-Israeli wars on the life of a person caught between two countries (Egypt and France), two faiths (Judaism and Islam), and two nationalities (Egypt and Israel). Ayyam al-shatat, by Kamal Rahim, Wikalat Sphinx, 447 pp.
