Spanning three continents and the course of a century, The map of Love traces a transcendent cross-cultural love affair back to its dramatic precursor generations earlier. Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist, has fallen in love with a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor. Shadowing her romance is the coutship of her great-grandparents Anna and Sharif nearly one hundred years before. In 1900 the recently widowed Anna Winterbourne left England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with political sentiment. She soon found herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al Baroudi, an Egyptian nationalist. When Isabel, in an attempt to discover the truth behind her heritage, reenacts Anna's excursion to Egypt, the story of her great-grandparents unravels before her, revealing startling parallels to her own life. Combining the romance and intricate narrative of a nineteenth-century novel with a very modern sense of culture and politics-both sexual and international-Ahdaf Soueif has created a thoroughly seductive and mesmerizing tale.