tani reviewed on 8/3/2005

I absolutely loved the first volume (Palace Walk) of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy, of which this is the third volume. The writing in this book is just as good (Mahfouz won the Nobel prize for literature.), yet somehow, the characters did not engage my interest the way the ones in the first volume did.

From the back cover:
"...he shows us Egyptian colonial society in all its complexity;...he makes us look through the vision of his vivid characters and see people and ideas that no longer seem so alien."
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewers called it "One of the most enjoyable books of recent memory." It just didn't reach those heights for me.

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