Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani
Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize. But since the English publication of Alaa al-Aswani’s The Yakoubian Building in 2007, it too has become, for me, an instant recommendation. This is a remarkable work, in which the goings-on in a venerable residential block, still in actual existence, is brilliantly presented as a microcosm of Cairo life.
With his latest novel, al-Aswani has attempted to create a parallel microcosm, this time in America among Egyptians who have moved there sometimes for political but chiefly for career and economic reasons.
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