A Pure Heart - Rajia Hassib

This book caught my heart. The beautifully descriptive prose! The difficult relationship between two close siblings! The insights into Egypt, both past and present! I loved the story from beginning to end.

Rose and Gameela, once close, are two siblings who have taken different paths in life. Rose, an Egyptologist, marries an American and leaves Cairo for NYC where she finds a new home for herself. Gameela, more strictly religious than Rose, at home in Cairo, is making a career for herself as an engineer when she is killed in a suicide bomb attack. When Rose goes home to bury her sister she discovers that Gameela’s life contained a lot of secrets, secrets that she aims to discover by collecting artefacts from her sister’s room and taking them back home with her to NYC.

A story told from several perspectives (Rose’s, Gameela’s, and also Mark, Rose’s husband’s), A Pure Heart is a beautiful story of family, belonging, faith, and love. It is also a story of revolution and Egypt, of past and present, of perception and reality, of guilt and forgiveness, and the divides they cause. I love how this novel goes about bridging these divides too, and how each character is a full person, human, people we all know and/or can relate to.

I loved the common theme of making one’s current abode into a home by attaching oneself to objects and/or places rather than people - this is what I have done all my life in all of the different countries and places I have lived, and I think this was such a huge reason why I connected with the narrative so much. Some areas may be seen as a little predictable (the suicide bomber who is radicalized in prison for example), but I actually feel there that this gives the novel more depth. These characters are all everyday people forced to face a barrage of different beliefs, loyalties, and needs, and you feel for each and every one of them.

Such a beautiful, beautiful novel. My heart hurts, but in a good way.