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.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He wrote nearly 40 novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous cinema plots and scenarios. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. He died in Cairo on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94. Tagreid Abu-Hassabo is a writer and translator currently living in New York.