 She lives through the governments of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak.Newspaper headlines from current events are interspersed with the story, taking up the even-numbered chapters while the story itself is in the odd-numbered chapters.Aboul-Ela wrote that these newspaper articles break up the novel's main story, include distinct characters and themes, and have the role of "further reinforcing [the story's] fragmentation, its alinear structure, and the sense that [Zaat] is caught in forces larger than herself."