Playing Cards In Cairo, By Hugh Miles

Earlier this year, my partner and I walked up to the entrance of the great Al-Azhar mosque complex in Cairo. She rapidly transformed her shawl into an impromptu headscarf. But the holy site's guardian still pretended to spot forbidden flesh, proclaiming, "It's not enough!" as some far more scantily attired Scandinavians strolled past. Hugh Miles's enchanting book about life, love, fun and faith in Cairo solves this mystery, and many others too. Faced with a British woman of Indian origin, the gate-keeper probably concluded that a backsliding co-religionist needed saving from herself. Many Egyptian Muslims, Miles writes, feel that they have "to check that other Muslims are observant, not least because it might be jeopardising their own afterlife if they do not".

From the designer outlets of Gezira island to the text-message obsession that (as Miles shows) breeds its own Arabic-English lingo, much of Egypt's smoggy, sprawling capital feels reassuringly secular. So it can come as quite a shock when outsiders strike the bedrock of traditional Islam. Playing Cards in Cairo tells the story of a British journalist who begins by sporting in the thin expat topsoil of bars, hotels and clubs. Lonely and broke back in London, he returns and – fatefully – gets an invitation to join a group of middle-class Egyptian women who meet to play a bridge-like game, tarneeb.

When he falls in love with a young doctor, Roda, Miles finds that to know her better he has to dig deep into Cairo's hidden substrata of domestic duties and codes of conduct. Soon he will hit immovable Islamic rock. His book shuffles a delightful pack of innocent-abroad anecdotes (don't try any curse involving the word "mother" on a Cairo cabbie), poignant personal stories (notably, the dating disasters of Roda's fellow-tarneeb fiend, Yosra) and eye-opening observations (from the popularity of hash to the vogue for hymen replacement surgery). Beneath the high spirits, Miles counts the cost of family constraints, toxic urban stress, religious control and "generations of misrule" on the Cairenes (especially the women), whose humour, courtesy and culture he salutes.

It all ends happily. The couple marry after Miles swiftly converts to Islam, as he must, thanks to an obliging sheikh at Al-Azhar. He celebrates with champagne: "I have changed my religion, not my culture." In this "topsy-turvy" metropolis, it makes a suitably mixed-up coda to a book that – like its characters – delivers both wit and heart.