A Young Egyptian woman studying at Harvard returns home to Cairo to visit her ailing father, a distinguished former diplomat and a member of the privileged Turkish-Egyptian upper class. She finds the sedate and decorous household of her family subtly changed: attending her father is a handsome orderly, a flamboyant dandy named Alex whom her mother has "found" on Antiquity Street, in the poor section of the city. Even after the young woman discovers Alex's secret life, she remains in love with him. Her family, predictably, is horrified by her affair with Alex; more ambiguous is her own consternation, the part desire, part dread summoned in her by this "poor Greek" so little her equal in education, taste, and class.In sensual language that evokes the powerful exoticism of Cairo and Alexandria as deftly as do the novels of Lawrence Durrell, Antiquity Street movingly explores the persistence of the past in a changing present. For the young woman's father - the aristocratic pasha - and for her family, the post-Nasser era has meant increasing isolation and loss of prestige: they recall the past with nostalgia. For Alex, the past is something to be desperately concealed and ardently reinvented. The articulate, willful, daring woman at the center of this unusual love story is torn between these two versions of Egypt, between her persisting devotion to her family and her passion for Alex. It is the remarkable achievement of Antiquity Street to record that struggle with persuasive candor and feeling. Read Less