The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother

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At the centre of young Ismail's world is the unknowable figure of his mother. Naive and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's great stone house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon, and is constantly at odds with her wise and thin-lipped mother-in-law. She is not without her own enigmas, and she fears that her intellectual son-- who uses words she doesn't understand, publishes radical poetry, falls in love freely and seems to be renouncing everything she embodies of the old world-- will have to exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer