Sandpiper - Review

New Internationalist, Oct, 2001

Sandpiper by Ahdaf Soueif

(Bloomsbury, ISBN 0747530815)

This is a sharply observed and vivid collection of stories from the award-winning author of A Map of Love. In Sandpiper Soueif's characters -- whether they are from Alexandria, Istanbul or England -- are usually experiencing some sort of defining crisis in their lives and her writing mixes tenderness with caustic observation. Her fine eye for the telling detail, the nuance of behaviour, allows her, as one character says of another, 'to lightly draw the fine-lined patterns that pull so many lives together'. Other books from the Egyptian writer include Aisha and In the Eye of the Sun.

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