Cairo imprint: 257 books

This book presents a concise account of the lives and times of some of the more significant occupants of the Egyptian throne, from the unification of the country around 3000

A chance encounter on a plane throws together Doha, a fashion designer unhappily married to a leading figure in the Mubarak regime, and Ashraf, an academic and leading dissident. The story of their relationship and Doha's self-discovery runs alongside a young Egyptian's search for the mother he never...

What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the end of the twentieth century? The mid seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein's rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq-Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth,...

A writer, a university professor, a woman: this is the insightful and humorous description of one hesitant revolutionary's experiences through the eighteen days of the Egyptian uprising that led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in January/February 2011. Juggling humor and horror, hope and fear,...

Gamal Abdel Nasser, architect of Egypt's 1952 Revolution, president of the country from 1956 to 1970, hero to millions across the Arab world since the Suez Crisis, was also a family man, a devoted husband and father who kept his private life largely private. In 1973, three years after his early passing...

The importance of Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898 to 1989) to the emergence of a modern Arabic literature is second only to that of Naguib Mahfouz. If the latter put the novel among the genres of writing that are now an accepted part of literary production in the Arab world today, Tawfiq al-Hakim is recognized...

Cotton made the fortune of the Fuda family, Egyptian landed gentry with peasant origins, during the second part of the nineteenth century. This story, narrated and photographed by a family member who has researched and documented various aspects of her own history, goes well beyond the family photo...

Yusuf Idris (1927 91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle,...

Maryam's Maze is an enigmatic novel by one of the most promising authors of a vibrant new generation of Egyptian writers. Set in the house of Yusuf el Tagi, Maryam's Maze relates the story of a woman struggling to find her way through the confusion of the world around her. Using the literary device...

Love who can count its varieties, measure its force, uncover the masks it wears, or predict how it binds and divides? In this spare novel, master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz gives us some of his most memorable characters, widely familiar to Egyptians from the film version of the book: Sitt Ain, with...

This novel of home and homelessness, of exile both physical and psychological, centers on Kimi, a fragile heroine suffering from a rift in her persona, unable to distinguish between her own pain and the pain of others. For Kimi it is not a simple case of to be or not to be, but rather of how to be...

From her cell in a women's prison, Aziza decides to create a golden chariot to take her to heaven, where her wishes and dreams can be fulfilled. As she muses on who to take with her, she tells the life stories of her fellow prisoners and decides in her heart which ones deserve a free ride to paradise....

With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last so that, like...

Rama and the Dragon, a multi-layered novel about the depths of human experience and the struggle between polarities, on the surface presents a love story of unrequited passion between Rama the symbol of multiplicity and creativity and Mikhail the symbol of unity and constancy. Their story reflects...