Houses behind the Trees

by Mohamed El-Bisatie, Muhammad al-Busati, محمد البساطي

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.

When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292720955
• ISBN13: 9780292720954
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 109 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

The Genders in an Egyptian Village

This books provided an eerie view of the Egyptian world and the lifestyle of the people in a village. The book immediately pulls the reader into the horrific plight of woman whose had an affair on her husband and what could be done to her because of it. But it's not a feminist book. It's a book that seems to be based on reality seen from both sides of the gender fence and surprisingly, one feels a certain amount of sympathy for the husband caught in this culture that requires a drastic response to a wife's infidelity.