In Upper Egypt, the Selim family patriarch gives his grandson ten commandments to help him endure life, enjoy its pleasures, and refrain from temptation. Awardwinning author Adel Esmat gives us a multi-generational epic, which he describes as “a thirty-year-long dream,” where the narrative sometimes follows a character, and other times an event. In ten chapters, each representing one commandment, the grandfather takes us to different eras, allowing us to see faces we have never seen and events that we could not have witnessed, and we journey with the family, who have lost their land and whose fates have taken a different path, on a trip to rural Egypt and reveals to us its depths, strengths, and weaknesses