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.

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.