The Orchards of Basra

A historical novel that shifts between contemporary Cairo and Ancient Iraq. In this captivating and remarkably translated novel, Mansoura Ez-Eldin invites us to a round trip in time and space, between Cairo and Basra in Iraq, to meet timeless characters in a masterfully-told story which subtly mixes fiction and historical reality. Hisham lives at home with his impoverished mother in Minya, on the western bank of the Nile. Like so many other young people in Egypt, who have managed to attend college, he lacks the connections to find well-paying work. So he makes ends meet finding and reselling old and rare books, driven by a selfless passion for the history of Islam, its great thinkers and currents of ideas.