Poisoned Pen Review: The Cairo Codex

This well written debut novel by Professor Emeritus Lambert who once served as a State Department Envoy to Egypt is both meaningful and entertaining. Meaningful in that she walks us inside modern Cairo-it’s 2007 in the story-with  its many communities in the Old and fast-growing new city, the growing factionalism affecting the secularists, moderate Muslims, the Copts, Jews, scholars, tourists, etc. Her tone is sympathetic, her view well rounded, she’s an informed tour guide. How shall I be a modern Egyptian woman, thinks Justine, conscious of her dual heritage. The backstory begins in 2CE in the family of elderly carpenter Joseph and his family who’ve been living in a cave in that part of Cairo called Babylon for several years, refugees from Israel (Palestine). The bridge is the small, battered, diary kept by Joseph’s wife and found by accident when Justine is trapped in a cave under the ancient church of St. Sergius during an earthquake and aftershock. There’s a death in the modern day as several agendas clash once the discovery of the book and its contents become known. So not Dan Brown, in fact more Bruce Feiler, part women’s fiction, part a meditation on three major religions and more (Tao figures in). The prose flows so comfortably it’s easy to gloss over the serious issues and read this for fun. Fans of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody books will lap this up, too.

-Poisoned Pen Bookstore, Scottsdale, Arizona

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Education, Egypt, Fiction, Taos, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.