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

Filled with compelling drama earthy humour and remarkable insight this book traces 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.|Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the most prominent literary figure in the Arab world of the Twentieth Century. Best known for his Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk Palace of Desire and Sugar Walk) which became an international bestseller he was born in Cairo in 1911 and lived in the suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters for the rest of his life. He published more than thirty novels as well as many collections of short stories plays and screenplays. In 1994 after he published a novel that led him into trouble with Egypt's religious authorities an attempt was made on his life but he died peacefully in 2006 aged 94.|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 ageing 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 humour and remarkable insight The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.