In 1974 the author visited a prison in Caïro and interviewed several woman interned there. One of them was Firdaus, a woman awaiting her excecution and this is her fictionalised story. 

It tells her story growing up in a society that treated women brutally and how the horrors she faced in life accumulated and forced her to commit the crime that got her the death sentence. 

This is a grim story, she goes from one abusive, exploitive situation to the other, there is no respite. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. Sometimes when books deal with difficult topics they can still bring some beauty in the writing. This however is just very straightforward, the telling, not showing kind of narrative.

I do however applaud it for it's place in feminist literature. It gives a voice to the many women and girls facing the same monstrosities in a society that was and still is in some parts of the world out to silence them.