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A thoroughly well driven book. I enjoyed it :)

"I will call you Hafsah bint`Umar now," he countered. "… because you are like a lioness, like the daughter of a lion." He chuckled at his own humour. Hafsah bint`Umar had been one of the wives of the Prophet Mohammad. She, alongside two other co-wives, had memorised the Qur'an by heart. She had even safeguarded the first collection of Qur’anic verses till the third Caliph had them placed in their present form, eliminating all other versions. To be given her name by Tariq, even as a joke, made Monica blush.

Tariq lifted himself off the sofa and his eyes wandered toward the door.

"You know something else?" he said turning toward her again at the last moment. "Westerners also veil themselves, didn't you know that?” He winked.

Monica felt squirms in the pits of her stomach and threw him a look rim full with indignation. “What do you mean?” she asked, in a voice that was laced with sudden haughtiness.

Tariq grinned. Was he seeing through her façade?
“They use too much make-up!" Tariq said lightly and, with tip of his index finger, he gently scraped at Monica's cheek. She trembled at his touch. The conversation had aroused her temper and as a result she felt like kissing him. She couldn’t help it. The controversial flow of ideas had made her endorphins take charge. There were so many subjects she could freely discuss with him and, on the other side, he was always evading her, holding back a notch. One day, she would not be able to contain the emotions he released in her and be forced to confess her feelings. But, instead of caressing her cheeks he wiped off a thick layer of foundation cream she had applied in the hope of disguising the ugly burn marks.

"Ciau bella," he whispered. "Tomorrow the Daughter of a Lion will sweep in for the kill! That bastard Fouad had better take good care!"

Travel Essay:
http://bary.newsvine.com/_news/2010/01/26/3812215-off-to-see-the-veddas-in-48-hours

In “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf notes how strange it is that illness should feature so little in fiction. Her explanation for why this might be applies equally to fatness and female sexual desire because both are species of physical experience, and literature, for the most part, does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind, that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for passions such as hate/love and greed, is null, and negligible, and nonexistent.

Woolf knew, as every one of us does, that this is nonsense, that “all day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolors.” But it is hard, almost impossibly hard, she suggests, to convey physical experience in words. To record in language “the daily drama of the body” — healthy or sick, fat or thin — would need “the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason footed in the bowels of the earth.” It would need “not only a new language,” she wrote, “but a new hierarchy of the passions.”

In my thriller DJERBA NIGHTS my heroine not only confronts the task of unraveling the identity of the murderer she also fights problems with overweight and he sexual longing for a man who is younger than her.

After having studied German Literature and History I began to travel, submerging myself into different cultures across the globe, in the quest for a common denominator between the peoples and their religions. I tramped through India, crossed China from Hong Kong to the Karakorum Highway along the old Silk Route, lived in Morocco for several years and criss-crossed the Andes of Latin America.

It has been a long journey and I hope to still find ever new aspects and stories to weave together in a way in which to delight my readers and, at the same time, inform them of the great beauty of diversity and the twists of international politics being played at our expence.

A collection of my travel essays can be found on tripsideways.com:

http://www.tripsideways.com/features/svenja-bary-visiting-the-veddas-of-sri-lanka/