CHICAGO: Rasha Adly’s first novel to be translated into English, “The Girl with Braided Hair,” is an extraordinary journey, where lives intersect in an ancient city, hundreds of years apart.
Cairo feels as old as time in Adly’s novel, translated by Sarah Enany, where her main character, Yasmine, an art-historian and professor, finds herself restoring a painting of an Egypt long-forgotten: A painting of a beautiful young Egyptian girl, Zeinab. The young girl wears traditional clothes but has a lace scarf on her shoulder, not something Egyptian women wore at the time. So how did this girl come to have a European scarf, and who was she? The mystery transports Yasmine to two-hundred years earlier, during the French Campaign of Egypt where life and futures are undetermined unless one is cunning and powerful.Mysteries concealed within the picture transport Yasmine to two-hundred years earlier, during the French campaign in Egypt, where life and prosperity belong to the cunning and powerful.