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Assiout: The saga of an Egyptian family
The Saga of an Egyptian Family by Hanna F. Wissa.
Hardcover
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 4, 2025
There is a mystery behind this book.
In the late 90s, my family was spending Christmas with our cousins in the UK, and I needed a present for my father, and wandered into a bookstore at random. Assiout is the town my grandfather is from, so seeing this in large print on the spine I picked it up and started to scan.
My family history is an unusual one, being Coptic Christians in Egypt, you don't see much written about this lineage. The main character's name is Esther, my father's mother's name. Her father was Akhnoukh, my grandfather's name and my last name. This is a name I had never before seen in print, really never seen anywhere.
So I got the book, and gave it to my father, and as would be expected he was thrilled. A couple decades passed and I saw the book at their home and decided to read it. It's an autobiographical telling of the author's influential family, Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt. The main character attended primary school at the same school American missionary school as my grandmother a few years earlier.
Anyways, the mystery is after I read this book I researched it a little, and it is almost like it doesn't exist. No reviews on GoodReads, none on Amazon. You can't buy it anywhere, not even used. It's like the author only published a small handful of books and placed them in the one bookstore, out of a thousand in London, that I happened to walk into.
Some weird incomprehensible tangle of fate or simply synchronicity? Regardless, one of my strangest encounters with a book...
In the late 90s, my family was spending Christmas with our cousins in the UK, and I needed a present for my father, and wandered into a bookstore at random. Assiout is the town my grandfather is from, so seeing this in large print on the spine I picked it up and started to scan.
My family history is an unusual one, being Coptic Christians in Egypt, you don't see much written about this lineage. The main character's name is Esther, my father's mother's name. Her father was Akhnoukh, my grandfather's name and my last name. This is a name I had never before seen in print, really never seen anywhere.
So I got the book, and gave it to my father, and as would be expected he was thrilled. A couple decades passed and I saw the book at their home and decided to read it. It's an autobiographical telling of the author's influential family, Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt. The main character attended primary school at the same school American missionary school as my grandmother a few years earlier.
Anyways, the mystery is after I read this book I researched it a little, and it is almost like it doesn't exist. No reviews on GoodReads, none on Amazon. You can't buy it anywhere, not even used. It's like the author only published a small handful of books and placed them in the one bookstore, out of a thousand in London, that I happened to walk into.
Some weird incomprehensible tangle of fate or simply synchronicity? Regardless, one of my strangest encounters with a book...
Displaying 1 of 1 review