The Shadow in the Backyard
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Book Overview
The Shadow in the Backyard
Alexandria in the 1930s: a city between sea and desert, between cosmopolitan brilliance and hidden poverty, between colonial order and intellectual unrest. At its heart, Louis Schuler runs a small bookshop-an island of words, encounters, and quiet freedoms.
Surrounded by British officers, Egyptian students, artists, and banned books, Schuler's shop becomes a meeting place where art, literature, and politics collide. Surrealism, Freud, Marx, Dostoyevsky-ideas that can liberate, and endanger. As surveillance tightens and informers draw closer, Schuler realizes that books are more than commodities: they are acts of resistance.
At the same time, memories surface-the loss of his wife, the underground cisterns of Alexandria, the sunken city beneath the sea-mirroring his struggle with truth and identity. What is visible deceives; what is hidden endures. The Shadow in the Backyard is a subtle historical novel about books as refuge, art as resistance, and a city whose light always casts shadows.
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