Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London society. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd menage (marshalled by the resourceful Omar) that travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor. When Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons, language lessons and excursions to the tombs, Sally too adapts to a new world, which affords her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. It's a winner of the Canadian Governor General Literary Award, which is two sided sword. While the award usually indicates that the book is well written, I've found books by Canadian authors to be typically very dark. This one wasn't. It was moody but not depressing as it talked about the difficulty of being a lower class female (ie - a maid) during the Victorian times and described the characters' time in Egypt. It also had a great description of the Egyptian setting and culture without distracting from the story.
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