Maha Ayoub

Nile Blues Maha Ayoub

What could a half-Christian veiled African, a tennis-playing millionaire socialite with Ottoman ancestors, a Nubian masquerading as her own children's missing father, a top executive hiding a shameful secret, and a burqa-clad ultra conservative abandoned wife, possibly have in common? For one, they share a dilapidated office in a derelict Kafka-esque bureaucracy, together with the local other-worldly inhabitant: an invisible evil Jinn, apparently intent on killing them all. And that's just the easy part. The ladies' placid routine is turned upside-down when they are ordered to move into a new modern building, a prospect even more distressing than the vicious civil war raging in their country for over fifty years. Five women, five very different women, undergo the death of a decrepit, post-colonial, multi-cultural and ethnically diverse country, and the subsequent agonizing birth of two new, and probably still-born, uniform ones. History is in the making, and the reader witnesses it through their eyes, tastes it through their lives, and shares their inability to alter the course of historical events; events that will transform their relations with each other, test their ability to hold their families together, or recreate them in a strange new reality. "Nile Blues" is an ironic take on a rigid society ruled by religious and political taboos, riven by ancient racial divides, and whose very fabric has been eroded by a bizarre mix of archaic superstition and state-of-the-art corruption. The story, narrated by the characters in their own words and through their scathingly irreverent wit, unfolds a tapestry of overlapping and conflicting desires and fears, personal and collective, woven together by the placid river, the Blue Nile, the undercurrent that both unites and divides.