Souief hereafter

The next best thing to winning the Booker Prize is being on the Booker shortlist. You may not get the cheque for £20,000, but the advance for your next book will make £20,000 look like pocket money, and although the hardback may not be bought by every Booker follower, the paperback certainly will. And then there's the whole backlist to consider.

For Adhaf Souief, this year's Egyptian-born outsider, just making the shortlist is enough; public recognition, she says, that she hasn't been wasting her time. Although her first novel In The Eye Of The Sun received astounding critical praise (Anthony Thwaite, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, called it a masterpiece), sales failed to follow suit. We meet at her house in Wimbledon. She apologies for the state of the kitchen - the house has recently undergone massive reconstruction due to subsidence and they have only recently moved back in. Her apologies are completely unnecessary. Like Adhaf Souief herself, the house is a delightful mix of east and west and exudes a feeling of comfortable muddle as the best family homes should. While In The Eye Of The Sun was semi-autobiographical, her second novel was pure invention. "I was telling myself that this would prove if I actually was a novelist or whether I had one good semi-aubiographical novel in me and that was it."

It was published in June and according to Souief the reviews were "quibbly", along the lines of great-romance-shame-about-the-history-and-politics. Yet within the context of people's lives, she reasons, how can you separate them out? And from the perspective of this reader at any rate, the book's great strength is that it suceeds in melding together all three elements in one stunning, seamless, un-put-downable narrative. For three months, depression set in. It had all been in vain. However, shortly before the announcement of the Booker shortlist, Adhaf Soueif's bank manager phoned to thank her for the book which she had sent him to keep the overdraft hounds at bay. "He said `I'm really just calling to thank you, because normally this would not be the kind of book that I would read. But I have enjoyed it so much and I have learnt so much from it and I think it's a wonderful book and my mother is reading it now.' And this really gave me heart."

Ahdaf Souief was born in Cairo in 1950. She moved to London when she was four, while her mother was doing her PhD at London University, and learnt to read via English comics and classics, such as Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit. On her return to Egypt four years later she had to re-learn Arabic. Her mother's thesis had been on the influence of the Oriental tale on English literature and it was to this theme that she has returned in The Map Of Love. "One idea was to take on the romantic genre, with a hero who is larger than life, tall, dark and handsome and with some hidden sadness. I have come across him as an Arab in various places, but he isn't really an Arab at all, he's just represented as one. I thought what if we made him a real Arab, with the problems of the day on his mind; the Arab attachment to the mother, the praying, the lot. But to still have a big romantic story with a desert and tents and all the rest of it.

"Also I really wanted to try and map out where we are now, in relation to where we were 100 years ago. Everyone now is getting so worked up about the Internet and how everything is getting so much smaller and yet I knew that 100 years ago the telephone had just appeared - the railroad and the telephone - it was a time of terrific change then. So those were my two givens, and that it would be East and West because that is the area that I am interested in." The Map Of Love tells the story of Anna, an English gentlewoman who falls in love with a high-born Arab caught up in radical politics. Running in tandem is a parallel story set in present-day America and Egypt. Both stories are woven together by the sensitive, present-day narrator, an alter ego for the author herself. Except for the central protagonists and their families, every character who appears in The Map Of Love really existed; politicians, colonialists, poets, radical thinkers, free-thinking women, both Egyptian and European. Adhaf Souief's meticulous research over 12 years beginning in 1900 ("I got it down month by month") gives her narrative a sureness that is essential if the complexities of Anna's position in both the societies she embraced is to be fully understood. At the heart of The Map Of Love is the belief that the European fear of the east in general and Islam in particular, is based on western misconceptions about the nature of Arab culture. "There is no need for this barrier, this fear that people are very other. Because they are actually not that other. And it also seems to me that the result of this fear and this sort of distance continuing is to strengthen the hardliners who are actually other. So the attempts to try and throw a bridge over that gap seems worth doing." Souief wrote The Map Of Love at night, usually not going to bed until 3 a.m. Working full-time and with two teenage boys to feed and help with homework when she got home, it was the only way she could do it, she explains. "I eventually found out that I had to say `I am not going to leave this chair until midnight'. Because I found out that just before midnight it would happen and once I'd started writing, it really had its own momentum, its own authority and it demanded that I sit down and do it." Often her youngest son, Rickie, would fall asleep under her desk.

LOVE of children permeates the book, and the transparency of emotion Souief bestows on all her characters lifts what in other hands could appear sentimental. Art and artifice and the craft of it, she says, are all very well, "but there's a level at which I think if you write from the heart you go to the heart. It sounds mystical and mumbo-jumbo, but there is a real sense in which you can really connect, if there is honesty."

Every night, when tiredness finally overcame her, she would print up the pages as she got ready for bed and turn them over face down. Only the next night would she read them, "and if they read as if you don't know where they came from, then that's the most wonderful thing."

From nine to five Adhaf Souief works with a non-profit-making Arab cultural organisation preserving old manuscripts throughout the world. When I arrived at her house for my appointment at 6 p.m., she was fast asleep, a cup of tea grown cold beside her. Clearly exhausted, she says that, although she loves her day job, she couldn't contemplate writing under similar circumstances again. Whoever is announced as the prize-winner next Monday, the nomination itself should make that possible. "The years it took me to write, all those nights, holding the mortage, the overdraft, the builders at bay. So the Booker nomination is like a public OK, a `maybe she's not mad after all maybe she did have a book that was worth writing'."

The Map of Love will be reviewed by Eileen Battersby in Saturday's books pages