Whoa what a read. I started reading at 9pm, and the next thing i know, ive finished it and went to sleep dreaming about it. This is a tale is about Firdaus, an imprisoned Egyptian woman, waiting to be executed because she murdered her pimp. She refused to tell her story, until the penultimate day of her death. A girl with so much promise and potential, but was abused, harassed and taken advantage of since she was very young, too young to even understand. It’s a feminist fiction, told from the perspective of this girl with high potential, lost in her world without parents to really care for her, she was then married off to an old man who abused her. She ran away, and every person who crossed her path continued to take advantage of her and raped her, men and women alike, to a point that she found herself living a prostitution life. This book peels the topic of freedom of choice, and how the society hid behind religion, patriarchy and wealth to inflict injustice on others. There’s a certain calmness in how the story is told, motives aren’t expanded on - we just go from point A to B, from one sad story to another. It delves into how one yearns for love, and where one fails to find it, the corresponding emotional impact of it is just heartbreaking. I need to rest a bit after reading this.