Synopsis
For four decades, from 1916 to 1958, family gatherings at the Batrakani household are an excuse to gossip, eat molokhiya, and tell endless stories.
Energetic and cosmopolitan, their family fate is entwined with that of their adopted land, Egypt, as it is caught in the upheavals of the twentieth century. Georges Bey Batrakani is the patriarch of this family of Greek Catholic, French-speaking Syrians, living in a Muslim Cairo run by the British. He is driven by the need to achieve the wealth necessary for the luxury he craves. His chosen method is to manufacture the tarboosh, or fez, worn by every member of the Egyptian establishment. As long as the tarboosh holds sway, the family flourishes. But in 1952, everything must change. Egyptians take the reins of power for the first time since the pharaohs, and the tarboosh becomes an anathema. The Batrakanis, birds of passage, their love affair with Egypt at an end, must move on to a new exile elsewhere.
Robert Solé was born in Cairo in 1946 and now lives in Paris. Harvill has published two of his novels in English, Birds of Passage and The Photographer's Wife. Birds of Passage was the winner of the Prix Méditerranée.
"Birds of Passage is delightful." (Richard Eder, The New York Times)
"Lovingly alive in the present of the era it evokes . . ." (Edward Stern, The Times Literary Supplement)
The New York Times Book Review - Peter Khoury
[A] wonderfully evocative novel... Told through the eyes of a grandson who makes good use of a relative's diary, the novel, ably translated from French by John Brownjohn, has characters as exotic as the setting... If this literary concoction is so rich that one occasionally loses track of the name of a sultan or a revolutionary, never mind. The dish is ravishing.