Gazelle

As mesmerizing as a tale from the lips of Sheherazade, Gazelletraces the story of Elizabeth, a thirteen-year-old American girl whose adolescent passion is awakened in theexotic climate of 1950s Cairo. While her mother?whose beauty and sexual prowess both frighten and fascinate Elizabeth?moves into a hotel to pursue a string of lovers, her father, a historian, loses himself in a world of chess and toy soldiers. Elizabeth?s imagination, primed by an explicit edition of The Arabian Nights, leads her to fantasies about her father?s friend, a gentle, older man named Ramses Ragab, a perfume maker who visits their house regularly to play games of war and who opens her up to the mystery of hieroglyphics and the art of exotic scents.