She wants to experience a side of Egypt that the colonials ignore and one day disguised as a man in order to see the beauties of the Sinai Desert, she and her guide are captured by young nationalists. Unlike most of her country men and women she wants to learn the language and about the indigenous people. Once there she comes to dislike the insular lives of most of the colonial Britons that she meets there. Widowed Anna travelled to Egypt in 1900 after her husband's death.

Amal immerses herself in Anna's story and in particular the love affair between Anna and the Egyptian nationalist leader who became her husband. On telling Omar about the trunk he suggests that she should take it to Cairo and show it to his sister, Amal, in the hope that she might help translate the Arabic portion of the journals.

Her English great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne,had married Egyptian, Sharif el-Baroudi, in 1901. As Isabel starts going through the contents of the trunk she realises that, unbeknown to her,she has Egyptian ancestry. The family tree at the front of the book was a big help here.In 1997 American Isabel Parkman, discovers amongst her mother's belongings a trunk and meets and falls in love with, Omar al-Ghamrawi, a famous Egyptian conductor who is known not only for his musical ability but also for his espousal of the Arab cause. This did, however, also mean that it took me a few chapters to realise who was actually telling the story. Thus the three intersecting stories are revealed to the reader at much the same pace as they are to the characters themselves. Once there she is befriended by an Egyptian woman who agrees to helps her with the task.The lives of the women are not portrayed in a linear fashion, rather the author reveals each of them piecemeal meaning that the reader discovers the characters and their stories in a way that is akin to how they might unpack the contents of the trunk that is at the heart of the book.

An American woman arrives in Cairo looking for someone to interpret the contents of a trunk that she has inherited. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?”This novel centres on three women of three differing nationalities, Egyptian, American, English, one of whom lived nearly a century earlier than the other two.

The map of love by ahdaf soueif