أجمل من نجلاء

Perhaps it is very cruel for any woman to be surprised by an American news channel mentioning about a photo that was taken of her without her knowing, 35 years ago, in her most vulnerable moments! This is exactly what happened to the Egyptian journalist “Najla Bahaa Al-Watan” while she was standing in her small kitchen in the center of Paris watching the “Fox News” channel. She announced a special interview with a former soldier who participated in the Second Gulf War in 1991, under the title “New Secrets from the Desert Storm War”! Naglaa discovered herself in front of the world after all these years, while she was barefoot and crying in her home clothes on the streets of the desert border town of Rafha! While the retired black soldier tells of the adventures of his body in the backyard of war, lying ajar before the gates of hell! Thus, the novelist “Sharif Saeed” takes us into the basement of the soul of the charming Naglaa, from the “Hussein Shaheen” neighborhood in Cairo, to the Saudi-Iraqi border, to the French capital, tracing the trail of secrets, and trying to catch up with stories before they fall from Naglaa’s memory due to age. Sherif Saeed; Egyptian novelist, writer, and documentary director, born in 1979. He graduated from the Faculty of Mass Communications at Cairo University, “Department of Radio and Television.” He wrote opinion articles for Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Watan newspapers. He directed and wrote the script for several documentaries. His first novel, “And I Love You, Salima,” received wide acclaim and was shortlisted for the Sawiris Cultural Prize in 2018, and his novel “Siniora Honey” won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Novel in 2025.