Extract

Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.

A tyrant rules a household on a narrow alley between the two palaces of old Cairo, his dominion as absolute and as fragile as the Ottoman order crumbling beyond his door. Naguib Mahfouz published these three novels between 1956 and 1957, tracing the al-Jawad family from the First World War through the 1940s, composing the great realist epic of modern Arabic literature. The patriarch prays at dawn and drinks at night. His sons choose nationalism, religion, or philosophy. His daughters negotiate marriages that are also political settlements. Mahfouz writes with the patient accumulation of Tolstoy, building a Cairo so dense with life you can smell the jasmine and hear the call to prayer. A civilization turns, and a family turns with it.