"What can we do? If we could take off this uniform we'd join you!" says one young soldier as he kindly lets Ahdaf Soueif and two neices past their cordon when they get stuck on 6 October Bridge in the centre of Cairo. Tear gas swirls all around and they can hardly see through streaming eyes.
That was January 28th 2011, perhaps the key day of the revolution, when Mubarak's National Democratic hq was set on fire, and it captures the feeling of sheer frustration in Egypt brought about by his regime: many people really on the same side, yet divided by despotism.
The moment also captures the once Booker shortlisted novelist's just-get-out-there approach to the revolution, on which she reported for the Guardian and gave regular broadcast interviews. The best parts of the book, which covers the 18 days of the revolution up to Mubarak's fall, have this down to earth eye-witness style, often "pulling in shallow burning breaths" as she finds hospitals blockaded (where doctors inside refuse to offer proper autopsies so shootings go unreported), and enters terrifying alleyways in which hired thugs hurl stones from rooftops.
The book has a large section in the middle that flashes ahead to October of 2011, when there was further trouble with the security services, which to me breaks the pace, and should have been put at the end, with the structure of the whole book altered.
But it's a gripping, insightful story with some vivid phrases and front-line scenes.
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