Between Two Times

Ramses Station, Cairo, Tuesday evening, 3 March 2026. For 8 years Laila Fawzy Ismail has sat behind the glass of Window 7, selling hundreds of journeys every day without taking a single one. She has a game no one knows about: for every face at the window, she writes a story in her head. Tonight she has decided to travel to her mother, Widad, in Qena, as a surprise for her sixty-fifth birthday. But the phone rings. "Mom". Once, twice, then 9 times. When she finally answers, she hears a trembling voice she has never heard from her mother: do not travel tonight, Laila. Any night but this one. Laila has no idea how her mother knew, or why she is afraid.

Laila takes the train. Late in the night she steps out into the gap between two carriages for some air, as the train crosses the Nile on the Nag Hammadi bridge. The air turns cold, the phone loses its signal, and the sound of the iron becomes an older sound. When she returns to her seat she finds wooden benches, a lantern, and a man in a tarboosh reading a newspaper dated 3 March 1974. At Qena station she sees a girl with a long braid running to the conductor, Saber Hammad: her mother at thirteen, and the grandfather who died in a train accident before she was born. Laila knows when the accident will happen, and she has less than two years. She sells her engagement ring, rents a room above a shop in the railway housing, and tries to save him. But she discovers that the past does not change easily, and that this time holds secrets that belong to her.

The science behind the story is real. Einstein showed that time is not the same for everyone: the clocks on satellites run at a different rate from ours, and engineers correct the difference every day. In 1949 Kurt Gödel found paths that loop back in time, like a railway line that looks straight to the passenger but, seen from a plane, circles a mountain and returns to its start. Kip Thorne studied the "wormhole", an imagined tunnel between two times that no one has ever seen. Novikov said that a traveler to the past changes nothing, because he was part of it from the start. And Hawking threw a party for time travelers, sent the invitations after it was over, and no one came. No equations and no difficult words. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.