In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.

Karnak Café

Literature & Fiction

naguib-mahfouz

United States

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

This unusual epic from the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz portrays five generations of one sprawling family against the upheavals of two centuries of modern Egyptian history.Set in Cairo, Morning and Evening Talk traces three related families from the arrival of Napoleon to the 1980s, through short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. This highly experimental device produces a kind of biographical dictionary, whose individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of perspectives. The characters include representatives of every class and human type and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life and the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt's citizens. Naguib Mahfouz's last chronicle of Cairo is both an elegy to a bygone era and a tribute to the Egyptian spirit.

Morning and Evening Talk

Contemporary

Anchor

In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed ménage à trois. Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young. Mahgub is a fiercely proud student who is determined to keep both his poverty and his lack of principles secret from his idealistic friends. When he finds that there are no jobs for those without connections, out of desperation he agrees to participate in an elaborate deception. But what begins as a mere strategy for survival soon becomes much more for both Mahgub and his partner in crime, an equally desperate young woman named Ihsan. As they make their way through Cairo's lavish high society their precarious charade begins to unravel and the terrible price of Mahgub's Faustian bargain becomes clear. Translated by William M. Hutchins

Cairo Modern

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize—winning writer’s masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons–the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.
Throughout the trilogy, the family’s trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.

The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (Everyman's Library)

Literary

Everyman"s Library

The Search

A powerful story of lust, greed and murder. Unflinching, tough, and dramatic, The Search was most certainly intended to be a harsh criticism of Post-Revolution morality, but, on its most elemental level, it is a lurid and compelling tale. From the Trade Paperback edition.

History & Criticism

DOUBLEDAY

A powerful story of lust, greed and murder. Unflinching, tough, and dramatic, The Search was most certainly intended to be a harsh criticism of Post-Revolution morality, but, on its most elemental level, it is a lurid and compelling tale.

Anchor Books/Doubleday

Naguib Mahfouz's haunting novella of post-revolutionary Egypt combines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with the suspense and rapid pace of a detective story.
After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahran emerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in more ways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a more personal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, who conspired to betray him to the police, are now married to each other and are keeping his six-year-old daughter from him. But in the most bitter betrayal, his mentor, Rauf Ilwan, once a firebrand revolutionary who convinced Said that stealing from the rich in a unjust society is an act of justice, is now himself a rich man, a respected newspaper editor who wants nothing to do with the disgraced Said. As Said's wild attempts to achieve his idea of justice badly misfire, he becomes a hunted man so driven by hatred that he can only recognize too late his last chance at redemption.

The Thief and the Dogs

Set against the backdrop of the the theater, this novel is a taut psychological drama on and off the stage. First published in 1981, this brilliant novel focuses on how time transforms people and their emotions.

Wedding Song

Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels: The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.

The Time and the Place and Other Stories

The Beggar

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Books by naguib-mahfouz

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Karnak Café

Morning and Evening Talk

Cairo Modern

The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (Everyman's Library)

The Search

The Search

The Thief and the Dogs

Wedding Song

The Time and the Place and Other Stories

The Beggar