Walking through Fire

The accumulated facts of El Saadawi’s life sound grim, but this is not the experience of reading her memoir, which is stormy and vivid, characterized by great intellectual and emotional restlessness. Her story [has] a pungency and intimacy that more varnished memoirs often lack. And what shines through it all is her indomitability and self-belief… Stormy and vivid, characterized by great intellectual and emotional restlessness … It seems certain that without powerful self-belief and faith in her own instincts, she would not have survived * Times Literary Supplement *El Saadawi’s poetic prose and searing details keep the pages alive with stories of triumph, dissent, death and disappointment * San Francisco Chronicle *A moving repudiation of those who have made Egypt’s history in the last century * Washington Post Book World *I think her life has been one long death threat. At a time when nobody else was talking, she spoke the unspeakable * Margaret Atwood *This is what great art does. It closes the great chasms between us. With words, Saadawi peels away the artifice to reveal the beating heart beneath the surface. We come away from this book as we do from all her others, amazed at her cool courage, profound insight, and deep passion. Without her brave work an entire country would not be fully known * Rebecca Walker *

Nawal El Saadawi was born in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, in 1931. A trained medical doctor, she wrote landmark works on the oppression of Arab women including Woman at Point Zero (1973), God Dies by the Nile (1976) and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977). After being imprisoned by Anwar Sadat’s government for criticising the regime, she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association in 1982, before being forced into exile in later life due to death threats by religious extremists. She returned to Egypt in 1996, running for president in 2005 until government persecution forced her to withdraw. Saadawi died in Egypt in 2021.