Red Wine

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Suzie Mohammad Galal, born in the Egyptian city of Suez during the War of Attrition in the late 1960s, is a woman of inner conflicts, at once a fighter and a lover, who traverses the boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Her whole life is intricately tied to the wars and political events taking place in Egypt. But as she grapples with where to begin her story of personal and national crises, questions of narration arise: which metaphor best serves the layers of meaning she wants to communicate, and whose voice is telling the story anyway?

Red Wine is both timely in its attention to the issues of state brutality, religious extremism, and gender, and timeless in the way it deals with the themes of coming of age, guilt, and sadness.