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Greater Love

UK Publisher: Faber & Faber

Greater Love charts the course of one woman’s journey to find love.

Aisha has always shielded her twin brother Jose from their cruel childhood in an archaic Portuguese village and when she finally fulfils her ambition and strikes out for Paris, she is torn between her powerful instinct for self-preservation and her guilt at having abandoned her beloved twin.

In Paris Aisha is employed as a nanny by a bourgeois couple and begins courses at the Sorbonne. When she falls into an affair with her male employer, her guilt about her brother bites deeper and prompts her to end the affair and invite Jose to join her. But when Jose arrives in Paris, Aisha realises that it is too late; their estrangement is complete. More vulnerable than ever, Jose meets a charismatic Muslim sheikh who brings him to Islam and a deadly form of enlightenment.

Parted from her twin forever, Aisha fades away, almost to the point of death, and it is the sheikh, the man she identifies as her enemy, who pulls her back into life. When the sheikh is unjustly deported to Morocco, Aisha journeys through the Atlas Mountains to find him – and in the process her very being is transformed.

In exploring the themes of love and redemption from a Muslim and Christian perspective, Lucy Wadham questions the stereotypes that threaten our world and invites us to look at the things that unite us.