The novel takes us through a long, intertwined history, and temporal and fateful intersections, to tell us about the biography of the Sirry family, or more precisely the biography of the Daoud family, the eldest son of Sirry.
In an intermittent chronological narrative, the stories overlap from the fifties to the present day, and in the background there are excerpts from my secret diaries. Alaa - the granddaughter - tells us about the transformations of what happened, whether with her or with the family as a whole. Through Alexandria, Cairo, and the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, we see, hear, and live with the heroes of the novel their tumultuous lives. We witness the turbulent cycles of time like a boat in the midst of the waves, the appearance of people and the disappearance of others, and the seemingly ordinary life matters; Love, marriage, divorce, abandonment, betrayal and death. In the midst of all this, Daoud attempts to preserve his ownership and partnership in the ancient "Metropole" hotel in the heart of Alexandria.It is a novel of characters par excellence, we get involved with them from the first pages, in a very ingenious narration and smooth language, the writer takes us moving between times, personalities and places, with successive events that we almost gasp as we follow them through the chapters of the novel.
