Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi

Details Saadawi;s persecution by successive Egyptian governments, her life in exile, threats to her life by extremist groups and her marriages and personal life

Foreword by Nadia Wassef1. The Threat 2. Spreading My Wings 3. The Village Doctor 4. The Tripartite Invasion 5. What is Suppressed Always Comes Back 6. Love and Despair 7. My Mother has no Place in Paradise 8. Moments that Belong Nowhere 9. The Death Threat 10. Beyond Consciousness 11. The Photograph 12. The Scalpel and the Law 13. The Defeat 14. Searching for Love 15. An Aborted Revolution 16. The Dream of Flying

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
Her honesty, strength, courage, and accomplishments are admirable and inspiring, Library JournalEl Saadawi's poetic prose and searing details keep the pages alive with stories of triumph, dissent, death and disappointment
A moving repudiation of those who have made Egypt's history in the last century
I think her life has been one long death threat. At a time when nobody else was talking, she spoke the unspeakable
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