It is 2011, Cairo, shortly after the revolution. Locked in her apartment, a woman named Bustan al-Bahr seeks to resuscitate Zumurruda, princess of Mount Qaf, whose story was distorted and then abandoned by the storytellers of the Thousand and One Nights. The author claims that the forgotten story of the Thousand and One Nights is Scheherazade’s favourite, and picks up the pieces of this lost legend, which she interweaves with another story, in parallel lines, of a young contemporary Egyptian. She uncovers the story of Hadir, who lives in Cairo with her grandmother; her mother Nadia is the woman she sees every time she looks in the mirror. In her childhood, Hadir loses a ring that will define her fate. Mansoura Ez Eldin masters both stories and interconnects them intelligently. Bustan is the only shared point between these two narratives, which come together at the end. “I wanted to mix the magic element with contemporary reality. I also wanted to explore the paradoxical relationship of the original or the authentic with its multiple copies,” says Ez Eldin.