A coming-of-age story is given a creative twist in this intimate, offbeat, and strangely affecting novel. The young narrator, age 11, lives with his aged father in a disheveled furnished flat in Cairo. Exceptionally attuned to the moods, habits, and silent yearnings of the adults around him, the boy decides to get organized and become an expert on adult behavior. Surreptitiously, he listens in on adult conversations, observes adult mannerisms, and guesses about comments he's not supposed to understand--and then he starts to sneak into neighboring apartments to watch adults napping, copulating, bathing, cooking, and all the other activities normal to their lives.

A riveting novel that is both an indictment and an elegy, a second-person memoir of Nasser’s final months in the voice of his former prisoner.   In 1959, at the age of twenty-two, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim was imprisoned by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. Over the following five years in prison in Egypt’s Western Desert, Ibrahim kept diaries that he smuggled out on cigarette papers. In this novel, Ibrahim takes up Nasser as a fictional character tied tightly to real events, offering a window into his daily life in his final years. Ibrahim follows Nasser during the War of Attrition and the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel and looks back on the events of the previous decades. He also chronicles Nasser at his most vulnerable, detailing a more private set of Nasser’s setbacks and defeats: the daily routines of a diabetic suffering from heart trouble in the months before his death. Political events as well as social and economic transformations are narrated through newspaper clippings and archival fragments, painting a portrait of the decline of a man who was once larger than life.  

A city - known for its light-heartedness, vibrancy and capacity for fun - is ripped apart by war. A young man - full of the vim, vigour and desires of youth - refuses to allow his spirit to be dampened ...November, 1980. An Egyptian writer has chosen the wrong time to come to Beirut in search of a publisher for his controversial book. Men with machine guns are on every street corner. When the writer meets an old friend from his revolutionary student days, he is introduced to two fascinating women: idealistic film-maker Antoinette and Lamia, the seductive wife of his would-be publisher. His attentions inevitably turn towards the two women, but the background rumble of strife and struggle becomes increasingly hard to ignore. Based on the author's real-life experience of the civil war in Lebanon, Beirut, Beirut is an exploration of how, even in the midst of chaos and violence, universals such as love, desire and yearning are still always our guiding forces.

Writing in an intriguingly symbolic and minimalist style, author Sonallah Ibrahim has been called the Egyptian Kafka. And no wonder. This wry take on Kafka's The Trial revolves around its narrator's attempts to petition successfully the elusive ruling body of his country, known simply as "the committee". Consequences for his actions range from the absurd to the hideous.

In Kafkaesque fashion, Ibrahim offers an unbroken first-person narrative rendered in brief, crisp prose framed by a conspicuous absence of vivid imagery. Furthermore, the petitioner is a man without identity. The ideal anti-hero, he remains, as does his country, unnamed throughout the intricate plot with a locale suggestive of 1970s Cairo.

Considered a major work, The Committee sardonically pierces the inflammatory terrain between ordinary men, unbridled displays of power, and other, broader concerns of the author's native Egypt. The novel's corrosive, shocking conclusion catapults satiric surrealism into a new realm.