Mahfouz is the entry point for almost every reader of Egyptian fiction. But Egypt has produced more first-rank novelists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than any other Arab country, and the post-Mahfouz generation deserves the same attention.
02
Zaat
A middle-class Cairo woman's life, intercut with thirty years of Egyptian newspaper headlines.
03
The Cheapest Nights
The defining short-story collection of mid-century Egyptian realism.
05
The Yacoubian Building
The best-selling Egyptian novel of the 2000s; Cairo as a vertical cross-section.