A new volume of three novels previously published separately by Anchor by Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Together with The Beggar, The Thief and The Dogs, and Autumn Quail (published by Anchor in December 2000), these novels represent a comprehensive collection of Mahfouz s artful meditations on post-revolution Egypt. Diverse in style and narrative technique, they render a nuanced and universally resonant vision of modern life in the Middle East.
Respected Sir, a latter-day Bleak House in Arabic (The New York Times),...

From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt.
The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its...

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz reaches back millennia to his homeland s majestic past in this enchanting collection of early tales that brings the world of ancient Egypt face to face with our own times.
From the Predynastic Period, where a cabal of entrenched rulers banish virtue in jealous defense of their status, to the Fifth Dynasty, where a Pharaoh returns from an extended leave to find that only his dog has remained loyal, to the twentieth century, where a mummy from the Eighteenth Dynasty awakens in fury to reproach a modern Egyptian nobleman for his arrogance, these five stories...

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz mines the riches of his homeland s ancient past in Rhadopis of Nubia, an unforgettable love story set against the high politics of Egypt s Sixth Dynasty.
While the ravishing courtesan Rhadopis is bathing, a falcon lifts one of her golden sandals and drops it into the lap of the Pharaoh Merenra II. Upon hearing Rhadopis described as beauty itself, the young pharaoh decides to return Rhadopis s sandal himself. When the two meet, they are immediately seized by a passion far stronger than their ability to resist. Thus begins a love affair...

Known and loved throughout Egypt as a work that celebrates the national character, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz s Thebes at War tells of a high point in Egyptian history ancient Egypt s defeat of Asiatic foreigners who had dominated northern Egypt for two hundred years.
With a visit from a court official and a provocative insult, the southern pharaoh s long simmering resentment boils over, leading him to commit himself and his heirs to an epic struggle for the throne. Filled with the grand clash of armies, staggering defeats, daring escapes, and glorious victories, and written at...

A major early novel by the Egyptian Nobel Laureate, published for the first time in English

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 cafe 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...

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...

In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed menage a 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...