Review: "a bittersweet story of barriers and restrictions"

This was in the Globe and Mail today. Not accessible if you don't have a paid account - I subscribed just to see this lol. It's part of a longer review of six books.

Like Djavadi’s novel, Leila Marshy’s The Philistine (Linda Leith, 330 pages, $19.95) also explores gay identity within a Muslim community, here in late-1980s Cairo. The daughter of a Palestinian man living in exile since he was a young boy, 25-year-old Nadia Eid travels to Egypt in search of her father, only to find realities she could remain blind to at home in Montreal. In Cairo she also meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist trying to break into the Western art market. Set against the backdrop of Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the First Intifada, Marshy’s is a bittersweet story of barriers and restrictions, which ones can only bend for now, and which ones can break. Painting detail by Khaled Hafez.