Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef

Do you dream of the easy, literary life of a bookseller? Want to own your own shop where you can loll around at the register, dispensing wisdom and raking in the cash? Prepare to be disabused of your conceptions. Nadia Wassef gives us a taste of the hectic, inspiring, and sometimes heartbreaking life of a Cairo bookseller. She contends with the usual bookseller challenges and also with a deeply misogynist society, bureaucrats, censors, corruption, and large-scale larceny. Not to mention corrupt larcenous censorial misogynistic bureaucrats. 

—Dave