Mohamed Ismail Sabry

A Drifting Sail Mohamed Ismail Sabry

The fifteen-year-old aristocrat, Jean, is forced to flee Marseille during the Great French Revolution in 1789. Captured by pirates while crossing the Mediterranean Sea, he ends up being sold as a slave in Mamluk Cairo, an enigmatic city, a host for various nations and different, often conflicting, sub-cultures. Caught up in the middle of power struggles and intrigues, he sails between the worlds of mighty warlords, conquering armies, and the common people. He finds himself not only striving for survival but for finding his own path between Orient and Occident, past and present, passion and true love. For the wind is ever-changing, forcing the sail to alter its direction again and again... The present version has considerable differences from an earlier Arabic version of this novel. The older version won the second prize of the Dar Al-Odaba'a (Writers' House) Literary Competition in 2005, an important Egyptian literary competition.