Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy: The City as We Never Saw It

Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy is more than the story of a family in old Cairo — it is a living record of a society changing between the 1919 revolution and the end of the Second World War.

The house as a small homeland

In Palace Walk the house is a closed world ruled by a stern father, until the street — and history — breaks in. Three volumes later, a third generation argues over ideologies the patriarch never imagined.