Ms. Parkhurst writes about autism from experience, as the parent of a child with Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s going to be one of our very big fiction titles for the summer,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher and senior vice president at HarperCollins Publishers. The novel, set in the tony Belgravia neighborhood of 19th-century London, features some familiar types: officious ladies, nosy servants, scandalous cads, questionable heirs and even a high-class dog. (“‘Zero to sixty,’ is what my mom calls it,” Ms. Parkhurst writes of the child’s emotional state in the book narrated alternately by Iris and her mother, Alexandra.) Ms. El Rashidi starts with her narrator as a six-year-old in 1984, sweltering in a home filled with worries about Mubarak.

Source: Wall Street Journal May 25, 2016 10:38 UTC