80 Days in Glasgow

About this book

80 days in Glasgow: a journey from snow to certainty. While February's meager sun was melting the ice off "Govanhill's" roads in Glasgow, no one in the Egyptian educational mission knew that the thawing would reveal what is heavier than earth; a young man's corpse thrown among the bushes, bearing familiar eastern features, and opening doors to questions that never close. "Ahmed Mansour," the tale's hero who seems at first glance implicated in a mysterious murder, decides to melt like snow and vanish, leaving behind a riddle the Scottish police were only its beginning. But the true tale does not begin there in Glasgow, but in the quiet village of "Ganzour" in the heart of the Egyptian Delta, where the features of a human being formed who sees in laws nothing but a point of view when they collide with his heart. In this novel, Islam Mady takes us on a wondrous temporal and spatial journey, reviewing "Ahmed Mansour's crimes" which were not sins in the traditional sense, but great sacrifices offered on the altar of love and loyalty to "Sara," the queen for whose eyes he betrayed a theatrical revolution in his childhood, and for whose smile he stole years of his future. Across 80 days of struggle between estrangement and homeland, between prison-fear and healing-hope, the threads of the present crime tangle with the painful past's shadows. From "Glasgow's corpse" to "the fields' blood" in Monufia, the writer masterfully weaves a tragic hero's features fighting in silence and bearing pain's journey without complaint. It is a novel of faithfulness transcending borders, and of the secret lovers bury in their chests until the last breath. It is an invitation to contemplate the value of dreams fulfilled in due measure, and of happiness whose worth we realize only after long toil and loss of hope.