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Continuing the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad and his family, this is a fascinating look at Egypt in the 1920s. Increased personal freedoms mix tenuously with traditions of family control, as two of Ahmad's sons court alluring women. Sequel to "Palace walk" and second story in "The Cairo trilogy".

Near the end of his life, an ill family patriarch surveys his family--son Kamal, in love with a prostitute; and his grandchildren, among them a communist activist, a Muslim fundamentalist, and a politician--as they face middle age.

The lives of the inhabitants of an apartment building in downtown Cairo intertwine as the destinies of a fading aristocrat, voluptuous siren, devout doorman, secretly-gay editor, roof-squatting tailor, and corrupt politician come together.

The story begins hundreds of years ago, when our hero—Qamr—is born as an outcast, at the foot of a mountain in Palestine, near her father’s strange, isolated village. Qamr’s mother must solve the mystery of why only boys are born in this odd, conservative village. Then, in 1001 Nights style, this tale moves into another. Qamr’s parents die and a prince with many wives wants to marry her. Qamr takes her favorite book, Wondrous Journeys in...

"The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan Ibn Numan. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Numan's forces. The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the Middle Ages, narrated from the perspective...

After he constructs a corpse from body parts found on the street, Hadi wants the government to prepare a proper burial, but when the corpse goes missing, a series of strange murders occur and Hadi realizes he has created a monster.

+ Add to Wishlist Browse Related Subjects Fiction in translation Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo's Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was thrown into the back of a police truck. There began a seven-month nightmare as he was swept up, along with fifty other men, in the infamous Queen Boat affair that targeted Egypt's gay community. Finally free, but traumatized into speechlessness,...

Baghdad, 1991. In the midst of the first Gulf War, a young Iraqi girl huddles with her neighbours in an air raid shelter. There, she meets Nadia. The two girls quickly become best friends and together they imagine a world not torn apart by civil war, sharing their dreams, their hopes and their desires, and their first loves. But as they grow older and the bombs continue to fall, the international sanctions bite and friends begin to flee the country,...