Mahfouz Cairo Trilogy

About Palace Walk

Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957) — is the most celebrated work of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century and the achievement that secured Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. The trilogy follows three generations of the Abd al-Jawad family through Cairo's Gamaliya district from 1919 to 1952, tracing the Egyptian nationalist movement, two world wars, and the revolution that ended the monarchy through the intimate drama of a single Muslim family. Palace Walk establishes the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad, a man of impeccable piety at home and spectacular libertinism outside it, and his wife Amina; subsequent volumes follow their children and grandchildren through the decades. It is the great novel of Arab modernization — the most novelistically accomplished account of what it meant for a traditional Muslim society to enter the twentieth century.