Naguib Mahfouz: 46 books

Master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz crowns his best-selling Cairo Trilogy with this final chronicle of the Abdal-Jawad clan, climaxing the story begun in Palace Walk and continued in Palace Of Desire.

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz mines the riches of his homeland’s ancient past in R*hadopis 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...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story...

A classic Mahfouz story exploring themes of marriage across class lines, spirituality, and the harsh realities of a precarious life. Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, "let life be filled with holy madness...

In Respected Sir, Mahfouz retells a familiar theme—vaulting ambition—in a powerful and religious metaphor. Othman Bayuumi's humble origins do not stop him from coveting the Director-Generalship of the governmental department he has entered as an archives clerk. It is a vision that becomes a lifelong...

The tumultuous alley of this rich and intricate novel (first published in Arabic in 1959) is inhabited by a delightful Egyptian family, but is also the setting for a second, hidden, and more daring narrative: the spiritual history of humankind. The men and women of a modern Cairo neighborood unwittingly...

Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels:  The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations...

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...

A vibrant novel of memorable characters who search for happiness and true love, cope with the bitterness that results from love's betrayal, and embrace new beginnings. Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Love in the Rain introduces us to an assortment of characters who, each...

Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.

A novel of loss and memory from the Egyptian Nobel laureate. On a school playground in the stylish Cairo suburb of Abbasiya, five young boys become friends for life, making a nearby café, Qushtumur, their favorite gathering spot forever. One is the narrator, who, looking back in his old age on their...

The second volume of the highly acclaimed Cairo Trilogy from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, Palace Of Desire is the unforgettable story of the violent clash between ideals and realities, dreams and desires.

Autumn Quail is a tale of moral responsibility, alienation, and political downfall featuring a corrupt young bureaucrat, Isa ad-Dabbagh, who is one of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 Revolution in Egypt. The conflict between his emotional instincts and his gradual intellectual acceptance...

This highly charged fable set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the late 1960s, centers on the guests of the Pension Miramar as they compete for the attention of the young servant Zohra. Zohra is a beautiful peasant girl who fled her family to escape an arranged marriage. She becomes the focus of jealousies...