In this collection of short stories Soueif’s often melancholy and frequently bittersweet prose revolves around clashes of culture and lost love. Every story centres on a female character and each of these suffer from a strong sense of loneliness or estrangement, despite their different homelands, problems and experiences. The tales are predominately set in Egypt or the United Kingdom, the sights and smells of Cairo coming alive through Soueif’s lyrical style.

While I Think of You has the ability to strongly awaken the reader’s senses and transport them to a foreign place, it contains only previously published material and no fresh work. All of the stories can be found in Aisha and Sandpiper. The problem with this is that the work taken from Aisha, which focuses on a character of the same name, is often much stronger and more congruent. The character is more developed and features in three stories and once she disappears another character, Asya, is introduced and appears in two stories. After that Soueif instead includes less notable stories with characters that do not resurface in other tales. This results in an anticlimactic feeling of disharmony for the reader as they progress through the collection.

The stories in I Think of You are for the most part potent, haunting and nostalgic. But they cannot compare to Soueif’s The Map of Love, which was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1999. I Think of You, while filled with strong writing, cannot be regarded as anything more than a summary of a now successful writer’s earlier work.