Tale of love in Cairo named romantic novel of the year

A family saga blending the hedonistic world of Second World War Cairo with the harsh realities of a mixed-religion relationship in modern-day Egypt has been named the Romantic Novel of the Year.

Rosie Thomas's Iris & Ruby - her 19th novel - was described by the chair of the judges' panel as a "stomach-wrenching" read at the awards ceremony at London's Savoy Hotel, organised by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

It is the second time that Ms Thomas, 59, has collected the prestigious writing prize, having won with her third novel, Sunrise, 22 years ago.

Iris & Ruby tells the story of a troubled teenager, Ruby, who swaps an unhappy home in London for the exotic allure of life with her 82-year-old grandmother, Iris, in Cairo.

While the two barely know each other at first, romantic events soon mean that they have more in common than they could have imagined.

The city provides an evocative backdrop for both women's love affairs; Iris relives a torrid wartime relationship with the enigmatic but doomed Captain Xan Molyneux, while Ruby falls for a local boy.

Ms Thomas, who wrote the book after travelling to the Egypt, said it appealed to male and female readers.

"There is always a hunger and a passion for a good story," she said. "I know that a lot of men have read it from my post bag."

Romantic fiction remains popular with the book-buying public. Some five and a half million romantic novels were sold in 2006, making it the second most commercially successful genre after crime.

Organisers said they felt this year's shortlist undermined arguments that women authors have tended to rely too heavily on their own personal experiences and feelings.

Ms Thomas, an inveterate traveller who has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, and spent time on a Bulgarian research station in Antarctica, said the romantic genre needed no defending.

Of Iris & Ruby, she said: "I am not giving too much away by saying there is a death. It is as much about old age as it is about falling in love and getting married. There is falling in love but there is no getting married. And it does not have a happy ending."

Ms Thomas received an engraved glass trophy and a cheque for £5,000 by the chair of the judges, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson.

Dame Tanni said: "I have to feel connected with the people; the story has to be stomach wrenching and, when it's over, stay with me, almost like part of my life. Rosie Thomas writes so beautifully about the feelings of people in war, the imminence of death and the importance of passionate and romantic love."

Iris & Ruby beat off Matt Dunn's The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook, Katie Flynn's Beyond the Blue Hills, Judith Lennox's A Step in the Dark, Carole Matthews's Welcome to the Real World and Elizabeth McGregor's Learning by Heart.

Also on the judging panel were writer and blogger Michael Allen and librarian Liz Brain. Last year's winner was Erica James, for Gardens of Delight.

Extract from the winner

'I remember. And even as I say the words aloud in the silent room and hear the whisper dying away in the shadows of the house, I realise that it is not true.

Because I don't, I can't remember.

I am old and I am beginning to forget things.

Sometimes I am aware that great tracts of memory have gone, slipping and melting away out of my reach. When I try and recall a particular day, or an entire year, even a damned decade, if I am lucky there are the bare facts unadorned with colour. More often than otherwise there is nothing at all. A blank.

And when I can remember where I have lived, and who I was living with and why, if I try to conjure up what it was like to be there, the texture of my life and what impels me to wake up every morning and pace out the journey of the day, I cannot do it.

I am 82. I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away.'

Iris & Ruby by Rosie Thomas