Those 18 days were the most beautiful days of my life,” Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany says of the January 2011 demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that swept his country into revolution, and forced dictator-president Hosni Mubarak to resign at the extraordinary, euphoric high point of the Arab spring.

“When you live through such a big event, you are not able – or I am not able – to write a novel about it directly. You should have a distance. I have this distance now and I’m writing a novel about the revolution,” Aswany says in his deep-voiced, accented English, as we talk over glasses of hot chocolate in a cafe on Edgware Road, London.

At first glance, his new novel – a belated arrival in its English translation, having been published in Egypt three years ago – looks like something quite different: a retreat, perhaps, from the maelstrom of Egypt’s present. Set in the 1940s, The Automobile Club of Egypt is a Middle Eastern upstairs-downstairs tale of servants and masters, Egyptians and colonials, decadent royals and family life.

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I’ve been told Istanbul is best at the winter, when a light snow coats its rooftops and skinny minarets reach into a dark sky, when the cobblestones are wet and the tourists are few. I do not know that place. Istanbul to me is a hot, relentless chaos that smells of salt and sour bread and fumes. Any possibility of a cold lingering fog over the strait dissolves under the loud summer sky; I cannot imagine it.

I come here every summer. Upon landing at Ataturk Airport, after bullying my way through customs, baggage claim, and the general anarchy that is Turkish travel, I am always greeted by the innocence of June or the blanket heat of July, and then by a taxi driver.

He’ll weave through the traffic in a way that inspires a futile desire for a seatbelt. He’ll use the exit lane and shrug that it really is just faster. He’ll ask where I’ve come from and why, if my mother is Turkish, she lives in the U.S. He’ll assume my father is American and he’ll be right. He’ll tell me then about his family of taxi drivers and the twenty-six-year-old son he lost to a car accident last month. He’ll show me his son’s photograph on a cracked mobile, rendering me a mumbling fool. He’ll shed a rogue tear. Then he’ll drive me in fits through the choked and tangled backstreets off the freeway, down through Besiktas on its main thoroughfare, left and past the old palace, and onto the winding road that borders that wide, historic strait, the Bosphorus.

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