When the Ground Vanished

The Suez Road, the night of 21 June 2026, the shortest night of the year. Hala Mokhtar, a 43-year-old engineer, is driving with her daughter Jana, 16, beside her, a sketchbook on her knees. A short quarrel, then a sentence that cuts: you only ever see me late. At the corner of Street 14, the street Hala watched being poured metre by metre, Jana gets out and sits under the new street lamp, crying. Hala stays in the car for two minutes, looking at the clock, and does not get out. Then they drive into the street. Halfway down, Hala looks in the mirror and sees her daughter crying on the curb by the lamp. She turns to her right, and her daughter is sitting next to her, silent, the pencil between her teeth.

The car dies, the phones go silent, and walking straight toward the gate brings them back to where they started. The laser meter in Hala's hand says the width of the street, 14 metres she knows by heart, is now 2.3 kilometres. Four others are trapped with them: Hammam the gate guard, Bassem the delivery rider, Mr. Lotfi, a retired geography teacher, and his wife Eglal. And all the numbers say one thing: the street grows deeper as the night goes on, and it has an edge that will close before dawn. Can Hala find the way out before it closes? And can she, just once, see her daughter in time and not late?

Behind the story is real science. Light needs time to reach your eye, so you always see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago, and the stars as they were years ago. In 1915 Einstein said that something very heavy bends space and time around it, like a heavy ball on a stretched sheet, so light passing near it is bent. Scientists saw this in the eclipse of 1919, when stars near the Sun appeared out of place. In 1979 astronomers saw two images of one object in the sky, because a galaxy in the way bends its light, and one image arrives more than a year after the other. Clocks also run a little slower near something heavy, which is why the clocks of the satellites behind the maps on your phone are corrected every day. And in 1999 a scientist slowed light in her lab until it moved at 17 metres per second, like a car in a street. 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.