His work is imbued with love for Egypt and its people, but it is also utterly honest and unsentimental.'-Washington Post Book World.ĭrawing on the characters and the spirit of the classic A Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights and Days is a significant departure for Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

'Throughout Naguib Mahfouz's fiction there is a pervasive sense of metaphor, of a literary artist who is using his fiction to speak directly and unequivocally to the condition of his country. 'The alleys, the houses, the palaces and mosques and the people who live among them are evoked as vividly in work as the streets of London were conjured up by Dickens.'-Newsweek 'An engrossing work, whose author can take his place alongside any European master you care to name.'-Sunday Times Mahfouz, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Literature”-The Global Ministries “A remarkable story, told over generations of a family in three novels, which gives an insightful perspective on historical and social aspects of 20th century Egypt. Hardbound “his great family and political saga of his city in the throes of change is an addictive, and distinctively Arab, chronicle of private and public life.”-The Independent Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller. 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. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the ageing patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician. 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. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons-tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. 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. 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.

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time.

Cairo trilogy