Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller

In 2002, three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose founded a fiercely independent bookstore.

At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Cairo. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Over the next decade, these three women would contend with censors, chauvinists, critics, one another and many people who said they would never succeed in establishing Diwan as Cairo's leading bookstore.

A moving portrait of Diwan and the Cairo that embraced it, an ode to all the people who have kept it going ― Harvard Review