Naguib Mahfouz: Palace Walk (The Cairo Trilogy #1) (1990)
English language
Published July 15, 1990
Palace Walk (Arabic title بين القصرين) is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and the first installment of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. Originally published in 1956 with the title Bayn al-qasrayn, the book was then translated into English by William M. Hutchins and Olive Kenny, and then published by Doubleday (publisher) in 1990. The book's Arabic title translates into 'between two palaces'. The setting of the novel is Cairo around the time period of World War I. It begins in 1917, during World War I, and ends in 1919, the year of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. The novel is written in a social realist style and reflects the social and political setting of Egypt in during 1917 to 1919.
It isn't my concious intention to read trilogies, but here I am. Happily, I guess, this first novel is about 40% of the whole. It is an interesting and moving Cairo family epic beginning about the time of WWI (The family wishes that the English will be confounded by the Zeppelin.).
