The narrator of “New Shoes” is a man who left his home in Cairo when he was eighteen, and, after four years living and working in various places in Italy and France, has been in London for eight years, where he now owns a string of small newsagent shops. Why did you choose London as the place he would settle?

I was interested in a person who is living in two places at once: one real, and the other desired. I have lived in London for the majority of my life, a city that is and has long been, of course, a place of refuge for people like my protagonist, who, no matter how long they remain here, can feel themselves a “guest,” as Virginia Woolf calls Joseph Conrad in her obituary of the author (he had, by that stage, spent forty-six years in Britain). All this to say that London famously remains at once hospitable to the outsider and adept at keeping him or her on the surface.

The narrator and his older brother initially thought that they would leave Cairo together, but the family could afford to pay for only one ticket. Would his life have been different had his brother been the one to leave and he to stay?

I believe so. Many who are forced by circumstance to make a life in a new country—supposedly the lucky ones—feel at once fortunate to seek safety or opportunities elsewhere and cruelly excluded, not only from the people and places they love but also from the selves they might have become had they remained home.

He and his brother talk often on the phone, but the tenor of their conversation has changed since his brother told the narrator that friends in Cairo believe they’ve seen him in the city. How disconcerting are these reports for the narrator?

Deeply. It is as if they awaken in him an inner dissonance. The two possibilities or versions of himself resonate against each other. The secret heart of the story is this man’s attempt to endure these contradictions or the inner noise of such a life.

The double, or doppelgänger, is a recurring conceit in myth and literature. Were you inspired by any particular examples?

Absolutely. Several works have accompanied me as I thought about my story. Ranging from the more obvious examples, such as “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “The Other,” by Jorge Luis Borges, and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” which I find myself rereading nearly every year, to less obvious examples, such as “Tristia,” that great exilic work by Ovid, V. S. Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival,” and what you might call the double lives of certain works of art—such as Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, which stirred Leo Tolstoy to write a novella by the same name, only for the two works to then inspire a harrowing string quartet by Leoš Janáček, and for the three works to somehow find their way into a novel by Margriet de Moor. Four “Kreutzer” sonatas started by Beethoven and stretching some two hundred years. And some paintings have been on my mind, too, such as Caravaggio’s “Narcissus,” Poussin’s “Echo and Narcissus,” and Titian’s “Venus with a Mirror.” But, even more specifically, the story is in dialogue with the British artist David Austen’s minimal and piercing drawings.

Yes. I believe the story emerged out of exchanges you’ve had with David Austen about the theme of the double. This month, an exhibition at the Cedric Bardawil gallery, in London, is showing thirty drawings of Austen’s in conjunction with “New Shoes.” Can you talk about his work and the way you’ve forged this artistic relationship?

I love David’s work, its depth and sensitivity, its fascination with the border between nature and the inner life, the haunted aspect of his figures, and the way he seems to urge us to focus, with devastating tenderness, on the lost and the displaced. Long ago I wrote a short essay about his work, and I still remember reading it to him in my studio late one afternoon and he and I sensing together the collaborative possibilities between language and image. Ever since, we hoped that we might work together. This is our second collaboration. And very much like the first project we worked in parallel, he showing me his drawings as they evolved and I shared with him drafts of “New Shoes.” And in this way his drawings and my story were nudged by each other, but in ways that remain hard to describe. The relationship between the two is certainly not illustrative. What is clear is that my story wouldn’t have been the same without David’s drawings.

As a boy and young man, you experienced exile twice. First, when your family moved from Tripoli to Cairo when you were nine, because of your father’s opposition to the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, as you described in the magazine and in your memoir, “The Return,” and then when you left Cairo to attend boarding school in the U.K. Have you, like your narrator, dreamed of an alternative life in which you’d stayed in Egypt—or in Libya?

It’s impossible not to. Beside me are the other Hishams: the one who remained in New York, where I was born when my father was a diplomat there; or the one who didn’t have to leave Tripoli and its sea, by which I grew up from three to nine, and where a part of me remains; or the other Hisham who might have carried on living in Cairo, where my family settled, and not left at fifteen for the U.K.; or the other one who would have returned to Cairo after university, or gone somewhere else perhaps more fitting to my Mediterranean temperament. This has infected me with the disease of elsewhere. Except I am now beginning to sense the possibility—only that—of a new consolidated state emerging, whereby my lives in London and New York, where I now live about half of the time, together with my attachments to Cairo and Tripoli, and burgeoning love affairs with other places, might all coexist with less fury. In my last novel, “My Friends,” the principal protagonist tells himself, “Let all your elsewheres go.” I suppose part of me aspires to that.

At the end of the story, the narrator decides to go shopping for shoes on Jermyn Street, one of London’s toniest destinations when it comes to buying shirts, shoes, and accessories for men. Why did you want to send him there? What do the shoes represent to him?

I’d rather not spell it out. A good reader will know. ♦