Mahfouz Cairo Trilogy Reading Order

Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk (1956) is the first volume of The Cairo Trilogy — the most celebrated work of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century and the novel 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 family patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad — a prosperous tradesman of impeccable piety at home and spectacular libertinism outside it — and his wife Amina, their children, and grandchildren through the Egyptian nationalist movement, two world wars, and the revolution that ended the monarchy. Palace Walk (1956) establishes the family world; Palace of Desire (1957) follows the second generation; Sugar Street (1957) closes with the third. The trilogy is, among other things, the great novel of Arab modernization — the most novelistically accomplished account of what it meant for a traditional Muslim society to move into the twentieth century.