Blue Lorries

In this novel, told in memoir form, Nada, whose father is Egyptian and mother French, narrates her childhood as the daughter of a political detainee in the late 1950s, her political activism and arrest as a university student in the mid-seventies, and the arrest of her younger brother during demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blue Lorries, whose title refers to the trucks used for transporting prisoners in Egypt, is the story of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century and also of one woman's life-long political activism and quiet defiance of the conventions of culture, marriage and children.