Hanan al-Shaykh was born in 1945 and grew up in Beirut. She is the author of five novels including BEIRUT BLUES, three of which have been translated into English. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages and they are banned from many Arab countries because of their sexual explicitness. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

'A fresh, amusing and surprising take on London, and on life' The Times 'An exquisitely comic tale of self-reinvention and survival' Guardian 'Devastatingly entertaining fiction ... teeming with ideas: memory and exile, language, desire and identity, and the search for order in the chaos of a metropolis' Literary Review 'A wittily sympathetic story about an England that tolerates but never quite accepts exotic foreigners' Sunday Times