The Shellal Ledgers

About this book

Aswan, 1960. The High Dam is rising, and the last villages of Old Nubia are being measured for drowning. Sania Hassan, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher, has pried a rusted strongbox out of a demolished gauge-house at Shellal. Inside: the British compensation ledgers of 1902, when the first dam swallowed the cataract villages and priced every palm, every field, every name. The only man who can read them is Youssef Bishai, eighty-one, a nearly blind Coptic clerk in a Cairo pension — the clerk who kept those books. He has the key. He will not hand it over until she sits and hears how each entry was made, and by whom, and what it cost. What Sania wants from the ledgers could restore her family's land, or bury them both under the new lake.