Aya Tantawy

A collection of short stories that follow the disappearance of several women from a poor neighborhood in Old Cairo as a result of a curse many years ago. The disappearance is both the beginning and the end of each story, thought the circumstances vary in each case: escape, murder, migration, inexplicable causes that are the subject of myth and rumour. Only the women and their bodies know the truth as to why they fled for safety from the cruelty in the confines of erasure and non-fulfilment. The stories unfold over a period of 70 years, from the distant past and into the near future. In each, the woman stands trial in absentia with her family and men of the neighborhood, popular customs and patriarchal traditions, and myths and old wives’ tales acting as judge and jury which attribute the woman’s vanishing to the power of jinn and the defense of tainted honor.