“But I am the son of no one, save the city of my birth: Alexandria, a capital founded by a brilliant Macedonian tyrant who, longing to be Greek, conquered Greece and then came to Egypt to build the perfect city, which he left behind to become a god. I am Alexander’s child, and like him I will not live long. I am Alexandria’s child, and like her I will live forever. I am the child of every book in Alexander’s great library, scattered to the wind and doomed to fire by conquerors and colonists.”
— Nasser El-Mohammedi, Prologue, The Gales of Alexandria
The ancient port was once the heart of the known world — where East met West, and knowledge and empire converged. Though centuries have passed, the winds that shaped Alexandria still blow through its children, reaching across continents. From the Middle East to America, the legacy of that city — its brilliance, its betrayals, its longing — threads through every page of The Gales of Alexandria, binding together a world fractured by conflict and history.
In Alexandria, the gales mark fall and winter, swelling the Mediterranean and bringing the ancient port to a standstill.
Each storm carries a name—some clear in origin, others drifting in mystery—but all return.
They don’t just shape landscapes—they shape lives, stirring change and defining destinies.
Was Nasser truly a terrorist, radicalized by faith, or a casualty of a fractured world that rarely seeks to understand? Why do we stray from our ideals? Can reconciliation emerge from loss, or are some wounds too deep?
Set against 9/11, the ensuing wars, and the Arab Spring, The Gales of Alexandria follows history professor Omar El-Mohammedi as he races to decipher his son Nasser’s journal—perhaps the key to stopping a terrorist attack. As Omar unravels its brutal passages, he confronts buried family truths, his own failings, and the mystery of a son who returned only as a body, wrapped in silence and unanswered questions.
The Gales of Alexandria is not only Omar and Nasser’s story—it’s also the story of those left behind, each carrying a piece of Nasser’s legacy and the silence he left in his wake.
His sister, Houda, turns to faith. His fiancée, Dalia, to activism. His closest friends, Youssef and Adham, now living in America, face reckonings of their own. Risa, a Jewish woman in a faltering marriage to Youssef, is pulled into the fallout. And Matt—a CIA officer torn between duty, family, and belief—must confront the cost of conviction.
Each bears the weight of what he left behind—and the echoes of a man who may have become a terrorist.