A Cambridge PhD student, Reem Hameed, has gone missing in Cairo and hasn’t responded to her WhatsApp messages for days. Reem was investigating a diplomat, Martin Wilcox Smith, his wife, Phoebe, and the fortune they amassed while in Tehran in the early 1970s. And Reem knows the family too: Phoebe paid for her grandparents to fly in for her graduation. The contrast between ambassadorial, stuffy Englishness and the atmospheric Middle East is cleverly drawn at every turn. Bunting pulls you in from the first page with the timeline moving seamlessly back and forth between London of the mid-2010s and early 1970s Tehran.

Source: The Guardian July 11, 2021 13:52 UTC