On the eve of her fortieth birthday Egyptian academic, Professor Hanaa, finds herself alone and unloved. For twenty years she has battled with an impossible love for an unattainable colleague, and has become outcast in a society where family and friends mean everything. Her life is organized into endless routines, and her emotions are hidden behind a façade of stern, but joyless professionalism. The façade begins to crumble, however, when her birthday brings with it the realization that she is about to turn into an embittered, forty-year-old spinster.

Never one to admit defeat, Hanaa determines she will lose her virginity before her birthday, and sets her sights on Khalid, her teaching assistant. An earnest, hardworking and devout young man, Khalid is an unlikely accomplice; however Hanaa’s powers of persuasion know no bounds. What ensues is a lively, witty, often sly commentary on gender and power relationships in both academia and the Arab world - a ‘campus’ novel of a wholly different bent.

REEM BASSIOUNEY is the author of five highly acclaimed novels in Arabic, all of which have been bestsellers in Egypt. Her second novel, The Pistachio Seller won the best Arabic translated novel award in 2009, and her novel Professor Hanaa, which appeared in Arabic in 2008, won first prize in the Sawiris literary award - the biggest award in Egypt.

Bassiouney’s new work is deep, original, fascinating…it opens new doors to the modern novel in the Arab world. It represents the present Egyptian society with all its complexities, paradoxes and pressing problems.   -- Gamal Al Ghitany, Novelist and editor in chief of Egypt’s premier literary journal, Akhbar Al Adab

This novel succeeds in depicting the agonies and conflicts between men and women, between personal freedom and family ties, between democracy and corruption, and finally between belonging and not belonging.   -- Rosa al Yusuf