The Smiles of the Saints
SynopsisPlot
Told through the voices of a group of close friends and spanning a generation, The Smiles of the Saints is an epic story condensed into a short, intricate novel. Twenty-year-old Haneen has just returned to Egypt after an absence of fifteen years spent mostly in a Parisian boarding school, cut off from all family save for sporadic visits from her father, Rami. She has been summoned back by her father’s twin sister, who gives her an envelope containing his diaries, the last section of which is missing. Reading Rami’s account of the passionate love affairs and tortured spiritual adventures of his youth, Haneen begins to unravel the riddle of a family she has barely known.
Story
About this book
Twenty-year-old Haneen returns to Egypt after fifteen years away, most of them spent at a boarding school in Paris. She has had almost no contact with her family during that time, apart from occasional visits from her father, Rami. Now summoned back by Rami's twin sister, Haneen receives an envelope containing his personal diaries. The final section of the diaries is missing.
As Haneen reads through her father's writings, she encounters accounts of intense love affairs and restless spiritual searching from his younger years. The diary entries gradually expose the outlines of a family she has barely known, and the missing pages raise their own questions. The novel is structured around multiple voices belonging to a circle of close friends, each contributing fragments of memory and perspective that span a full generation.
Ibrahim Farghali compresses this wide arc of time and experience into a compact, layered narrative. The story moves between Cairo and Paris, between past and present, and between the written record Rami left behind and the gaps where it falls silent. Haneen's attempt to piece together her family history drives the book forward, but the overlapping voices ensure that no single account holds the complete picture.
