Love in Exile, By Bahaa Taher, trs Farouk Abdel Wahab

An Egyptian journalist is in exile in an unnamed European city in 1982. He's in late middle-age, he's separated from his wife, his son is well on the way to becoming a fundamentalist Islamist, and he's disheartened by the impossibility of ever getting the truth about Israel printed. Then three things happen: he falls in love with a young German woman, Brigitte; he is offered a job on a new, "progressive" newspaper by a mysterious Arab prince; Israel occupies the Lebanon.

This multi-themed novel about love, exile, disillusionment and politics contains passages of lyrical beauty, as well as reportage on sickening atrocities. The engagement with politics and sexual politics, and the thoughtful, introspective tone, put one in mind of an Arabic Milan Kundera. One thing lets it down: the plodding translation. ("She was letting out before another human being whom she met by accident at the time she wanted to talk, all the dialogue that kept taking place for years in her head.") The language needs more suppleness to do this story justice.