In this final volume of Naguib Mahfouz's masterpiece trilogy, al-Sayyid Ahmad is aging, ill, and confined behind the mashrabeya that once confined his wife. But in his grandsons we see a modern Egypt emerging: one becomes a communist activist, another a Muslim fundamentalist, both working for what they believe will be a better world. And a third launches a promising political career abetted by a homosexual relationship with a prominent politician.
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.
