A novel by Nila Praan · Based on a true story
Letters
from the Square
Cairo, January 2011. A seventeen-year-old joins his family in Tahrir Square as a thirty-year dictatorship begins to fall. What follows is a decade of hope, betrayal, and quiet endurance — told through protests, prisons, and anonymous letters.
Letters from
the Square
Nila Praan
“They tried to bury us — they did not know we were seeds.”
The Story
A square, a country, a generation — and the letters that survived them.
When seventeen-year-old Ra'is and his family join the crowds in Tahrir Square in January 2011, the public uprising they take part in finally topples their country's thirty-year dictatorship. But the afterglow of victory is short-lived.
Fresh protests break out in Cairo and internal divisions fracture the newly elected democratic government, and the country falls under military rule. After a shocking massacre in a public square, Ra'is struggles to come to terms with the bloodshed and the deaths of two close friends.
Soon after, his own family is plunged into an unexpected nightmare of loss and despair when an arrest in the middle of the night shatters their world.
Based on true events spanning a decade from 2011 onwards, the novel weaves through a series of protests, interlaced with anonymous letters from a prisoner — whose identity is only revealed at the end of the book.
As a story of a collective fight for justice under a corrupt dictatorship, Letters from the Square provokes the reader to position oneself amid the ever increasing polarization, division and decay in our own societies.
From the pages
Three voices, one square.
I was about to run ahead with a piece of brick in my hand for what felt like the hundredth time, when I felt a searing pain rip through my right cheek and inside my mouth. I touched my face and saw in shock that my fingers were covered in blood.
Remember me as I remember you.
The potential of this shared spirit is immense, and equally immense is the deep, dark regression we fall into when we are divided.