Using unpublished family documents, the remembrances of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family's personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States.

In this beautifully written memoir (Publishers Weekly), Jean Said Makdisi illuminates a century of Arab life and history through the stories of her mother, Hilda Musa Said, and her Teta, Granny Munira Badr Musa. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, the Suez crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars, and civil war in Beirut, she reveals the extraordinary courage of these ordinary women, while rethinking the notions of traditional and modern, East and West. With a loving eye, acute intelligence, and elegant, impassioned prose, Makdisi has written much more than a memoir, rather an embrace of history and culture (Cleveland Plain Dealer).