BOOK DESCRIPTION :
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.
AVALABILITY : https://www.amazon.com/dp/1971228729
