Temple Bar

Mutazz, a young Egyptian scholar with little money, has moved to Dublin to write a doctoral thesis on the poet Seamus Heaney. The city is unfamiliar to him, and his days are shaped by pressure from a family with lofty hopes and by a painful, one-sided love he left behind in Cairo.

In Ireland he faces a run of hardships: difficult landlords, women whose intentions he cannot read, the workings of the Irish courts, and seminaries that seem to carry an unsettling past. To pay his bills he sells flowers along the Liffey through the cold winter nights. He also carries his own inner conflicts abroad, chiefly the tension between his desires and his wariness of emotional attachment, unless the woman in question matches an idealized image he holds.

Over the year he spends away, Mutazz comes to see how varied the world is. Yet his return to Cairo proves a jolt that pushes his physical and emotional resilience to the limit. Only after he gets through that ordeal can he begin again with real promise.