Three children cross an invisible border into a frighening world where they are taken prisoner, only to later wonder whether the really want to be rescued.

Comes with a classy-appearing binding: dark navy with gold lettering. I've ordered several copies over the years for wedding gifts. A nice memento for achieving togetherness

I first head excerpts from this book years ago on NPR. It is a wonderful tribute to all forms of friendship, and makes a marvelous gift.

Enright in his novel portrays his Egyptian characters as type characters lacking essential individuality; they carry certain race typicality. They hold no status higher than that of maimed beggars, slavish servants, stupid servants, wild savages, swindling peddlers, ruthless murderers, ugly prostitutes as if there were all the people one is likely to encounter in Enright's Egypt. He calls them primitives, beasts, barbarians, and even satanic creatures. Moreover, Academic Year contains the negative stereotypes that embody all the vices traditionally associated with the oriental female: stupidity, ignorance, materialism, sensuality, and emotional detachment to the extent of claiming that prostitution in Egypt tells one about the position of women in Egypt. In addition, all through the novel Enright is fond of comparing the 'primitive' Egypt to the 'civilized' England. Such a comparative method is but a disguised racial prejudice.

Enright implicitly criticizes the Egyptian stupid nationalism which gives them the right to rule their own country without any British claiming that they are lacking or even devoid of ' strength of character, independence, governing capacity, discipline, self control and even sense of responsibility.

The 'bloody' riots that take place in Egypt are a point of interest for Enright to describe although he did not mention the real motives behind such demonstrations. Violence seems in his opinion, to give vent to their suppressed, perverted feelings and innate ruthlessness as if they enjoy disasters and blood.

Meanwhile, he ridicules the educational system in Egypt embodied in the feverish rituals of the final examinations, the force of oral examinations, the process of duplicating and marking the papers. He contents that such a 'great' literature as the English literature should be taught to a race whose literature is next to nothing, and alludes to the great part which England has performed in the work of 'enlightening modern Egypt'- a legacy of the common occidental mission to the orient.

His hostility to the Islam and the Muslims is very clear in the novel. He paints a picture which shows how Muslims are incapable of telling the truth or even of seeing it; they are fanatic and fatalistic, they are swayed by passions, instincts and unreflecting hatred of Christians and Jews. His hostility is clear from the titles of each chapter which are lines of verse from the holy Quran using them in an ironic way or as an ironic commentary on the content of each chapter.

Enright's tone has the vein of the high-handed attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European orientalism. His selection of incidents, language in narration, omission of certain details suggest attitudes and assumptions stemming from the cleverly-concealed prejudice and help to dramatize a contrast in the perceived characteristics of the race. He deliberately omits the good aspects of the Egyptian society. He fashions a technique allowing the reader only a single-faceted response towards the Egyptians. He leaves no space for the reader to comment but is commenting all through the novel. Though the novel is narrated in the third person singular, his voice is very clear in the novel.

Being a member in the Movement, Enright uses many of the aesthetics of the Movement in his novels. His attitude to the political realities of modern Egypt seems typical of the Movement, an attitude of disgust that one lives in barbarous bloody times. It is an anti-romantic novel depicting reality as it is. His disbelief in allusion and myth represents a important current of feeling within the Movement. His treatment of Egypt is concerned not with metaphysical absolutes or mythical assumptions but with hard-bitten realities and human relations. The Movement's ideology is reflected in Enright's debunking familiarizing treatment of nature; he condemns any appearance of nature-worship. The language he uses for describing landscape is extremely conventional. However, towards the middle of the novel he gets enchanted with the seascape embodied in the Mediterranean Sea.