Middle Eastern literature / Egyptian literature

The Quarter

by Naguib Mahfouz, Roger Allen & Elif Shafak

Meet the people of Cairo’s Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late...

The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel

by Leila Aboulela

“A versatile prose stylist... [Aboulela’s] lyrical style and incisive portrayal of Muslims living in the West received praise from the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee... [she is] a voice for multiculturalism.”—...

The Yacoubian Building

by Alaa Al Aswany

August Book Sense Pick

A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed ‘scientist of women.’ A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the...

Alexandrian Summer

by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Yardenne Greenspan & André Aciman

Love, lust, and the convulsions of history surge through this dazzling novel about the vanished cosmopolitan world of Alexandria.