Born in Egypt and now living in Britain, novelist Ahdaf Soueif says she is caught in the space between two cultures. She's placed both of those cultures under a magnifying-glass in her Booker Prize short-listed novel "The Map of Love." The book examines the complex historical and political relationship between Egypt, Britain and the US, but Soueif told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr she set out to write a romance. She says she is a fan of the genre of stories of courageous Victorian women setting out from the West to explore the exotic east, and so that is where she started.