Naguib Mahfouz · 1956
Palace Walk
بين القصرين
Bayn al-Qasrayn — Between the Two Palaces
“The street was enveloped in silence, a silence deepened by the lamp's faint light and the dew of the cold, damp night.”
Begin ReadingPublished in 1956, Palace Walk is the first novel of the Cairo Trilogy — and the work that transformed Arabic literature forever. Set in a traditional Cairo household during the final years of the First World War and the eruption of the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, it is at once an intimate family drama and a portrait of a society on the brink of transformation. Its author, Naguib Mahfouz, would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 — the first Arabic-language writer to receive the honor. But Palace Walk remains his greatest achievement: the novel that made him the voice of Egypt, the Dickens of the Cairo alleys, and the great chronicler of a world caught between the old ways and the forces of modernity.
“How easy it is to lose oneself in the alleys of the old city, where every stone tells a story and every window hides a life.”
— Naguib Mahfouz
The novel centers on the Abd al-Jawad family, presided over by the formidable Al-Sayyid Ahmad — a conservative patriarch who rules his home with iron discipline, even as he leads a second life of music, wine, and women in the city's night. His wife Amina has not left the house in twenty-five years. His children — Fahmy the idealist, Kamal the observer, Khadija and Aisha the daughters who live in his shadow — are caught between duty and desire, between the suffocating safety of tradition and the terrifying promise of change. When the 1919 Revolution erupts on the streets outside their door, the walls of the house — and the family — begin to crack.