She also gives us dialogues that are taking place in Arabic but which she renders in a special kind of English.

Soueif is happy to send us off to her glossary, including in her novel even short exchanges of transliterated Arabic. 'You make more effort, you make sure you understand - and are understood.' Sharif's poet friend Isma'il Sabri tells him that it is better for two lovers not to have a shared language.

To let us do so, Soueif endows their speech with a certain awkward formality, letting us hear that their expressions are not instinctual. Je commençais à m'inquiéter.' But when they actually speak to each other, the dialogue is present in English and we must imagine the French. It's good that I should have to come some way to meet you.' When, on his own, he imagines what she might say to him, we get the words in French, 'Tu es en retard. Sharif asks Anna if she is troubled by not being able to speak to him directly. In its most romantic strain, the novel lets us believe that having to speak through an artificially adopted language is a kind of liberation. 'Maqloub: upside-down mutaqallib: changeable and inqilab: a coup.' Amal tries to explain to Isabel how Arabic words stem outwards from simple roots, taking the word 'Qalb: the heart' and following it through its other forms as far as unlikely derivations. In the effort to get at one language through another, its characters teach each other about words. Soueif's novel is written in English, yet much of the time it is conveying speech and thought that takes place in other languages. In the reconstructed story of Anna, set in early 20th-century Egypt, the novel's Edwardian heroine befriends Leyla and falls in love with her brother, Sharif, but must speak with both of them in a shared second language: French. In modern-day Egypt, a young American woman, Isabel, has befriended Amal, an Egyptian woman, because she needs her to translate the Arabic documents among the trunk of journals and letters that she has inherited from her British great-grandmother, Anna. It makes the crossing between languages the very substance of the narrative. Yet it takes the emphasis on the business of translation further than this. The Map of Love certainly has this lexical exotica, the unfamiliar terms for unfamiliar clothes or food or cultural rituals.

From Midnight's Children to Brick Lane, we have become used to novels that are written in English but include 'foreign' words. She translates them, and sometimes provides etymological commentaries on their roots and connections. The novel includes a glossary, in which the author lists many of the Arabic terms that appear in it. T he English-speaking reader of Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love needs help with words.

The map of love by ahdaf soueif