The novel On the Greenwich Line, by the Egyptian writer Shady Lewis, came out in 2019. Since reading it in Arabic in 2023, I have given the original Arabic version or the French translation to several of my friends (there’s also a German translation), and now I will be giving other friends the English translation that is due out next month. With great sensitivity, Lewis has written a very funny comic novel about immigration, racism, and bureaucracy in London, where he is a social worker. In a lecture at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in April 2023, he said that when the news is so full of horrors every day that we become inured to them, humour can revive our feelings. The treatment did me a lot of good.