Naguib Mahfouz
Recent and Bestselling Books
Heart of the Night
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byAida A. Bamia
Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descends to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
...read more
Hardbound
112 pp.12.5X20cm
12.99
Heart of the Night
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byAida A. Bamia
Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descended to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
Heart of the Night is a classic Mahfouz gem exploring marriage across class lines, spirituality, and the harsh realities of a precarious life written by one of Egypt’s most celebrated literary masters.
1 March 2021
Paperback
90 pp.15x23cm
9.99
Complete Backlist of Naguib Mahfouz
Adrift on the Nile
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byFrances Liardet
It is the late sixties, and for the group of friends who meet night after night on the houseboat on the Nile, times have changed. Nasser has ushered in an age of enormous social change, and these middle-aged sons and daughters of the old bourgeoisie are left high and dry, to gather beneath the moonlight, to smoke and chat and inhabit a cosy and enchanted world. But one night Art and Reality collide with unforeseen consequences. In Adrift on the Nile, Mahfouz has given us a tale, at once thrilling and deeply serious, which exposes the human and artistic dilemmas of modern times.
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Paperback
176 pp.14X21cm
8.99
Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byTagreid Abu-Hassabo
In Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz tells with remarkable insight the story of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh whose iconoclastic and controversial career has such resonance with modern sensibilities. Years after the king’s death, a young man with a passion for the truth questions the pharaoh’s contemporaries—including his closest friends, his bitterest enemies, and his enigmatic wife Nefertiti—in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten’s court. As they each report their version of events, Mahfouz allows his readers to decide for themselves the truth about Akhenaten.
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Paperback
180 pp.12.5X20cm
8.99
Arabian Nights and Days
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Denys Johnson-Davies
Drawing on the characters and the spirit of the classic A Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights and Days is a significant departure for Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Though he is best known for chronicling his own times, in this novel, first published in Arabic in 1982, Mahfouz injects new life into an Arabic masterpiece. Though it is set in an Islamic city in medieval times, the modern reader will find much in this novel that is surprisingly familiar. It depicts a city plagued by widespread corruption among its most powerful citizens, and a pervasive sense of social unrest and insecurity. The chief of police is kept particularly busy dealing with the underground activities of various religious sects that are intent on changing the unscrupulous regime. Amid all of this, as in the Thousand and One Nights, genies appear out of bottles accidentally opened by innocent individuals, affecting their lives in exciting, sometimes detrimental ways. Famed for his skill as a storyteller, Naguib Mahfouz has here produced a novel that is as colorful and entertaining as the book that inspired it.
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Paperback
240 pp.13X20.5cm
9.99
Autumn Quail
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRoger Allen
Revised by John Rodenbeck
This is the story of one man and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Isa al-Dabbagh is a senior civil servant in the Egyptian government who loses his job, and his fiancee, when the Purge Committees of the Revolution bring his venal past to light. His personal relationships reflect the resulting internal conflict he suffers between mind and heart, between intellectual acceptance of the Revolution and the basic emotional instincts that hold him back.
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Paperback
172 pp.12.5X19.5cm
8.99
Before the Throne
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
In this extraordinary drama-in-dialogue, Naguib Mahfouz reveals his love for all of Egypt’s extensive history—and his deep knowledge of it. In Before the Throne, he summons nearly sixty of Egypt’s rulers to the afterlife Court of Osiris, from a king who unified Egypt for the first time, around 3000 BC, to a president assassinated by religious extremists in 1981. He includes names as familiar as the pharaoh Ramesses II and as obscure as the medieval vizier Qaraqush. Defending their behavior before the divine tribunal, those who acted for the nation’s good are honored with immortality, but those who failed to protect it leave the gilded hall of eternal justice with a very different verdict. Full of Mahfouz’s unique insight into his country’s timeless qualities, this controversial work skillfully traces five thousand years of Egypt’s past as it flows into the present, through the mind of its most acclaimed author.
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Hardbound
128 pp.12.5X20cm
16.99
Cairo Modern
An Egyptian Novel
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byWilliam M. Hutchins
The novelist’s camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da’im. A scamp, he fancies himself a nihilist, a hedonist, an egotist, but his personal vulnerability is soon revealed by a family crisis back home in al-Qanatir, a dusty, provincial town on the Nile that is also a popular destination for Cairene day-trippers. Mahgub, like many characters in works by Naguib Mahfouz, has a hard time finding the correct setting on his ambition gauge. His emotional life also fluctuates between the extremes of a street girl, who makes her living gathering cigarette butts, and his wealthy cousin Tahiya. Since he thinks that virtue is merely a social construct, how far will our would-be nihilist go in trying to fulfill his unbridled ambitions? What if he discovers that high society is more corrupt and cynical than he is? With a wink back at Goethe’s Faust and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Mahgub becomes a willing collaborator in his own corruption. Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer’s best-known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heartfelt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.
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Paperback
248 pp.15X23cm
10.99
Children of the Alley
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byPeter Theroux
In this rich and intricate novel, Naguib Mahfouz guides us through the history of an alley whose denizens—some fearsome, most fearful, a few fearless—are all the descendants of one man, Gabalawi, who now keeps himself hidden away in the mansion at the top of the alley. From the supreme feudal lord who disowns one son for cruel pride and puts another to the test, to the savior of a succeeding generation, we observe the men and women of this quintessential Cairo neighborhood unwittingly reenacting the lives of their venerable forebears, telling through their rivalries, battles, love affairs, and miracles the spiritual history of mankind.
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9 July 2015
Paperback
424 pp.15X23cm
11.99
Dreams of Departure
The Last Dreams Published in the Nobel Laureate’s Lifetime
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
In this second collection of writing, based on his own dreams serialized in a Cairo magazine before his death in 2006, Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz again displays his matchless ability to tell epic stories in uncannily terse form. As in the first volume (The Dreams, AUC Press, 2004), we meet more of the real (and unreal) figures that filled the author’s life with glory and worry, ecstasy and ennui, in tales dreamed by a mind too fertile to ever truly rest. In them, a man sent by a victorious invader to open a storehouse holding the statue of Egypt’s reawakening finds his access denied by a menacing reptile. An obscure writer dies, and a despairing inscription on his coffin turns his funeral into a massive demonstration. A man opens a stubborn gate to stare at a lake over which loom the illuminated faces of those he has loved, but who are no more—in search of the soul who made him long to live forever. The ever more condensed and poetic episodes in Dreams of Departure movingly carry on Mahfouz’s only major work after a knife attack in 1994 ironically inspired him to dream in print for his readers.
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Hardbound
140 pp.13.5X21cm
10.99
Dreams of Departure
The Last Dreams Published in the Nobel Laureate’s Lifetime
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
In this second collection of writing based on his own dreams, serialized in a Cairo magazine before his death in 2006, Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz again displays his matchless ability to tell epic stories in uncannily terse form. As in the first volume (The Dreams, AUC Press, 2004), we meet more of the real (and unreal) figures that filled the author’s life with glory and worry, ecstasy and ennui, in tales dreamed by a mind too fertile to ever truly rest. In them, a man sent by a victorious invader to open a storehouse holding the statue of Egypt’s reawakening finds his access denied by a menacing reptile. An obscure writer dies, and a despairing inscription on his coffin turns his funeral into a massive demonstration. A man opens a stubborn gate to stare at a lake over which loom the illuminated faces of those he has loved, but who are no more—in search of the soul who made him long to live forever. The ever more condensed and poetic episodes in Dreams of Departure movingly carry on Mahfouz’s only major work after a knife attack in 1994 ironically inspired him to dream in print for his readers.
...read more
Paperback
140 pp.13.5X21cm
9.99
Heart of the Night
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byAida A. Bamia
Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descends to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
...read more
Hardbound
112 pp.12.5X20cm
12.99
In the Time of Love
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Kay Heikkinen
Love—who can count its varieties, measure its force, uncover the masks it wears, or predict how it binds and divides? In this spare novel, master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz gives us some of his most memorable characters, widely familiar to Egyptians from the film version of the book: Sitt Ain, with her large house, her garden, her cats, and her familiar umbrella, strong and active, mother of the neighborhood; her son Izzat, so different from her, emotional and unsure of his way; and the friends of his childhood, Sayyida, Hamdoun, and Badriya, all their lives entangled and shaped over many years by the encounter of commitment, ambition, treachery, and above all love. This is a story in and of twentieth-century Egypt, which can be read on more than one level. The neighborhood and the motifs may be familiar, but they combine to tell a new and intriguing tale, with an unexpected outcome.
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Hardbound
152 pp.12.5X20cm
12.99
Karnak Café
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRoger Allen
At a Cairo café, a cross-section of Egyptian society, young and old, rich and poor, are drawn together by the quality of its coffee and the allure of its owner, legendary former dancer Qurunfula. When three of the young patrons disappear for prolonged periods, the older customers display varying reactions to the news. On their return, they recount horrific stories of arrest and torture at the hands of the secret police, and the habitués of the café begin to withdraw from each other in fear, suspecting that there is an informer among them. With the nighttime arrests and the devastation of the country’s defeat in the 1967 War, the café is transformed from a haven of camaraderie and bright-eyed idealism to an atmosphere charged with mounting suspicion, betrayal, and crushing disillusionment. Exposing the dark underbelly of ideology, and delving into the idea of the ‘necessary evils’ of social upheaval, Karnak Café remains one of the Nobel laureate’s most pointedly critical works, as relevant and incisive today as it was when it was first published in 1974.
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Paperback
116 pp.12.5X20cm
9.99
Love in the Rain
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Nancy Roberts
Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Love in the Rain introduces us to an assortment of characters who, each in his or her own way, experience the effects of this calamitous event. The war and its casualties, as well as people’s foibles and the tragedies they create for themselves, raise existential questions that cannot easily be answered. In a frank, sensitive treatment of everything from patriotism to prostitution, homosexuality and lesbianism, Love in the Rain presents a struggle between “old” and “new” in the realm of moral values that leaves the future in doubt. Through the dilemmas and heartbreaks faced by his protagonists, Mahfouz exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn any breach of sexual morality while turning a blind eye to violence, corruption, and oppression.
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Hardbound
140 pp.12.5X20cm
12.99
Midaq Alley
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Humphrey Davies
This much-loved Mahfouz masterpiece is a rich account of life in a back street in a poor quarter of medieval Cairo. While the novel focuses on a willful young woman whose ambition to escape the confines of the alley leads her into prostitution, a pageant of other vivid characters, from the café owner who likes boys to the man who creates maimed beggars and from the young man with the faithful heart to the rake and the pimp, fleshes out the picture of a society in crisis and transition. Though the novel is set during the Second World War, the characters’ alienation from the prevailing political system and the desire of many of them to escape the economic and social stagnation of the alley give the work an unexpectedly up-to-date flavor. Mahfouz presents his characters with wry humor and a relish for the contradictions and fallibilities innate in people everywhere (even the alley’s beloved spiritual mentor beats his wife). This new translation of one of the writer’s best known works has been undertaken to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 2011.
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Hardbound
288 pp.15X23cm
18.99
Midaq Alley
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Humphrey Davies
This much-loved Mahfouz masterpiece is a rich account of life in a back street in a poor quarter of medieval Cairo. While the novel focuses on a willful young woman whose ambition to escape the confines of the alley leads her into prostitution, a pageant of other vivid characters, from the café owner who likes boys to the man who creates maimed beggars and from the young man with the faithful heart to the rake and the pimp, fleshes out the picture of a society in crisis and transition. Though the novel is set during the Second World War, the characters’ alienation from the prevailing political system and the desire of many of them to escape the economic and social stagnation of the alley give the work an unexpectedly up-to-date flavor. Mahfouz presents his characters with wry humor and a relish for the contradictions and fallibilities innate in people everywhere (even the alley’s beloved spiritual mentor beats his wife).
...read more
9 July 2015
Paperback
288 pp.15X23cm
9.99
Miramar
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byFatma Moussa Mahmoud
Edited and revised byMaged el-Kommos
John Rodenbeck
The setting is Alexandria in the early 1960s where six characters, all made exiles by circumstances, are brought together in the decayed elegance of the Pension Miramar. The central figure is Zohra, the beautiful peasant girl, whose relationship with the other five characters symbolically reflects the most basic political and social realities of the period.
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8 December 2016
Paperback
150 pp.15X23cm
8.99
Morning and Evening Talk
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byChristina Phillips
A late work by the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate, Morning and Evening Talk is an epic tale of Egyptian life over five generations. Set in Cairo, it traces the fortunes of three families from the arrival of Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century to the 1980s, using short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. This highly experimental device produces a kind of biographical dictionary, whose individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of different perspectives. The characters include representatives of every class and human type, and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition—and the accompanying upheaval—emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life, of the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt’s citizens. Naguib Mahfouz’s last chronicle of Cairo is an elegy to a bygone era and a tribute to the Egyptian spirit. It is also one of his most technically innovative contributions to the Arabic novel.
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Hardbound
220 pp.15X23cm
12.99
Khan al-Khalili
A Novel
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRoger Allen
The time is 1942, the Second World War is at its height, and the Africa Campaign is raging along the northern coast of Egypt as far as El Alamein. Against this backdrop of international upheaval, this novel tells the story of the Akifs, a middle-class family that has taken refuge in Cairo’s historic and bustling Khan al-Khalili neighborhood. Believing that the German forces will never bomb such a famously religious part of the city, they seek safety among the crowded alleyways, busy cafés, and ancient mosques of the Khan, adjacent to the area where Mahfouz himself spent much of his young life. Through the eyes of Ahmad, the eldest Akif son and the novel’s central character, Mahfouz presents a richly textured vision of the Khan, drawing on his own memories to assemble a lively cast of characters whose world is framed by the sights, smells, and flavors of his childhood home. As Ahmad, a minor civil servant who has sacrificed both education and personal ambition in order to support his family, interacts with the people and traditions of Khan al-Khalili, a debate emerges that pits old against new, history against modernity, and faith against secularism. Addressing one of the fundamental questions of the modern era, Mahfouz asks whether, like the German bombs that threaten Khan al-Khalili daily, progress must necessarily be accompanied by the destruction of the past.
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9 July 2015
Paperback
312 pp.14.5X22.5cm
11.99
Khufu’s Wisdom
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
Pharaoh Khufu is battling the Fates. At stake is the inheritance of Egypt’s throne, the proud but tender heart of Khufu’s beautiful daughter Princess Meresankh, and Khufu’s legacy as a sage, not savage, ruler. As the tale begins, Khufu is bored in his great palace at Memphis. To entertain him, his architect Mirabu expounds on the mighty masterwork he has so far spent ten years building, with little yet showing above ground—what will become the Great Pyramid of Giza. Mirabu and the clever vizier Hemiunu tempt him with other amusements as well—but to no avail. Then one of the king’s sons fetches a magician with the power to predict the future. The sorcerer says that Khufu’s own offspring will not inherit Egypt’s throne after him, but that it will fall instead to a son born that very morning to the High Priest of Ra. Furious, Khufu and his crown prince, the ruthless Khafra, set out to change the decree of the Fates—which fight back in the form of Djedefra, the boy at the center of the prophecy, and his heart’s desire, Princess Meresankh. Yet will the unsuspecting Khufu survive the intrigue around him—not only to finish his long-awaited book of wisdom, but to become truly wise?
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Hardbound
206 pp.15X23cm
16.99
Naguib Mahfouz
His Life and Times
Rasheed El-EnanyNaguib Mahfouz (1911 –2006) is the only Arab writer to have been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The author of thirty-five novels, fifteen collections of short stories, twenty-five film screenplays, numerous critical works, and in his later years over five hundred short fictions based on his dreams (partly published as The Dreams and Dreams of Departure by the AUC Press in 2004 and 2007), he has been hugely influential on several generations of Arab writers, and his books are now read in more than forty languages around the world. In its citation for the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted that Mahfouz “through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.” And he has been described by Nadine Gordimer as “one of the greatest creative talents in the realm of the novel in the world,” by Ahdaf Soueif as a “massively important influence on Arabic literature,” and by Alaa Al Aswany as “the founder of the new Arab novel . . . . our father.” In this first biography of Naguib Mahfouz in English, Rasheed El-Enany looks at the life of the man and the work of the writer, and assesses the oeuvre and legacy of a towering figure in the Egyptian and Arab literary world who was able to reach far beyond his own linguistic and cultural boundaries to an admiring readership across the globe.
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Hardbound
208 pp.30 illus.
13X20cm
14.95