Cairo

Set among the demimonde — where nothing and nobody is as they seem — Cairo is a novel about growing up, the perils of first love, and finding one’s true place in the world.

Frustrated by country life and eager for adventure and excitement, eighteen-year-old Tom Button moves to the city to study. Once there, and living in a run-down apartment block called Cairo, he is befriended by an eccentric musician Max Cheever, his beautiful wife Sally, and their close-knit circle of painters and poets.

Tom is delighted at his new life, but his charismatic older friends aren’t quite what they appear to be. As he falls increasingly under their sway, Tom enters a bohemian world of parties and gallery openings, but also of more sinister events involving murder, deception and betrayal, not to mention one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century: the infamous theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman.