A young Egyptian poet walks the streets of Downtown Cairo to find herself among battered volumes of a second-hand book stall, where she finds a novel published more than a quarter century earlier, Love and Silence. She has never heard of its author, Enayat al-Zayyat. Brushing the dust off its cover, she buys it. She later learns that Enayat committed suicide before her novel was published, and that she was the childhood friend of Nadia Lutfi, the acclaimed Egyptian actress. Another twenty years later, the young poet is now an established writer and a professor of Arabic literature. The same battered novel lies open on her desk. Her obsession with its author, the rebellious spirit who took her own life, continues to press at her like a threat: what turn in the road led Enayat to such a decision? On the Trail of Enayat Al Zayyat is an experimental work of literary investigation in which the poet Iman Mersal traces the history of a life in writing cut short by circumstance and the law. Roaming the city, sifting through legal transcripts and newspaper archives, and conducting intensive interviews with relatives and those who knew her, not least Nadia Lutfi herself, Mersal offers the readers a narrative that weaves an investigation out of novelistic technique.