Cover

Also by Leila Aboulela

ALSO BY LEILA ABOULELA

The Translator

Coloured Lights

Minaret

Lyrics Alley

The Kindness of Enemies

Leila Aboulela

Elsewhere,
Home

Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Leila Aboulela

Cover design by Rose Cooper
Cover photo collage: chair © Giovanni Meregheti/Alamy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Telegram Books

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic edition: February 2019

ISBN 978-0-8021-2913-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-4694-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

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Summer Maze

It was not her first time boarding the Egypt Air flight from Heathrow to Cairo. Nadia’s life was a zigzag of these annual visits that sometimes stretched into every single day of the holidays and made the September return to school feel abrupt and unfocused. She had made sure to pack the PlayStation but it might not be enough. Her mother’s bulky arm pressed against her. Lateefa was in her best clothes but Nadia wasn’t. They had argued about this.

The airplane was going to be full and there was a mix up over the seating arrangements. Nadia watched the steward struggle in his broken English to remove a couple from seats which their boarding cards indicated to be rightly theirs. He pronounced every ‘p’ as a ‘b’ so that it was, ‘Blease this is seat 3D’. Just like my mother, Nadia thought. The next challenge taken up by the crew was to find enough storage space for the hand baggage of the Egyptian passengers. Big, bulging plastic bags testified to suitcases that were unable to hold any more, filled to the brim with the results of shopping. Like my mother, Nadia thought.