An Egyptian American woman visiting her parents' homeland begins a dark romance with an unemployed photographer who is addicted to cocaine and living in a rooftop shack in Cairo, in a novel about identity politics.

The few of us who read this book found a lot to like in it. Naga presents us with a complex and troubling story from two perspectives: a wealthy American returning to Cairo to try to make a life and a poor Egyptian who comes into her orbit as lover and then stalker. The choice to inhabit the perspective of the male Egyptian was interesting and complex -- it's hard not to find some empathy for him as you see him struggle with his own take on the failure of the Arab Spring and deal with the class distances in the city, but it's a very interesting choice to give us space to sympathize with someone who has been abusive and misogynist. The American perspective is very deftly handled and we enjoyed that a lot. In particular, she serves as a complicated window into Cairo, able to give us some insider information but still always being treated as an outsider, only accepted when she has a native partner. Similarly, the book puts us in that arms-length position, giving us some insight into what Cairo is while at the same time making it clear we will never actually understand. All of this is great and if the novel had ended this way, it would have gotten high marks. But suddenly in the final act, we're brought into a writer's workshop analyzing the text we've just read. It's very meta in a very bad way. It reads like a slightly narrativized version of reader questions. The book couldn't have ended with the end of the second section, but this ending was just a flat-out mistake. Overall, Naga did a great job with the core story, but she needed a better ending that trusted that we got her points from the parts she wrote well.