Set in Cairo in the early 1950s, this novel portrays the psychological torment of Omar, an ardent revolutionary in his youth who in middle age has been left behind by Nasser's 1952 Revolution. His conscience has died. As he struggles for psychological renewal, he sacrifices his work and his family to a series of illicit love affairs, which simply increase his alienation from himself and from the rest of the world.
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.
