LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Praise

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Winning the peace

      Chapter Two: Beware policemen in pubs

Chapter Three: I’m not Canute

Chapter Four: Answering the phone to Chrissie Bates

Chapter Five: Kicking

       Chapter Six: Yes, I am

       Chapter Seven: Making friends

       Chapter Eight: Yalla, let’s go

       Chapter Nine: The palaces

       Chapter Ten: Ya habibi, oh my darling

       Chapter Eleven: Convoy

       Chapter Twelve: Abydos

       Chapter Thirteen: The Winter Palace

       Chapter Fourteen: ‘Well, I woke up this morning,

       Chapter Fifteen: Ezwah

       Chapter Sixteen: I don’t think you understand

       Chapter Seventeen: A little touch of someone in the night

       Chapter Eighteen: Sekhmet

       Chapter Nineteen: Iftar, Eid, the end

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Also by Louisa Young

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.

      I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’

      Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.

      It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.

      Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.

      I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage

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