"Like a Cat Crossing the Road" is a novel whose subject is "the world" and not a specific place or identity. It is the story of a human being crushed in the mighty machine of globalization, dissolved in capabilities created by enormous forces that determine his fate and tear up his maps to push him towards death or madness. All of its characters are expatriates, each of them fleeing from his own great and private war, searching for a lifeline to pull him out of his personal hell. Every person here crosses his bank towards another bank, crossing quickly and in confusion, exactly like a cat crossing the road, hoping to reach the opposite sidewalk... but her life has been lost. You get lost in an instant, under the wheels of a speeding car. Novelist Hatem Hafez embarks on a new and unusual adventure in Egyptian literature, not only because the characters in his novel are non-Egyptians, but because the events themselves take place entirely in "exiles" between Swiss Basel and French Paris, in addition to other exiles in the background.
