اللص والكلاب

Newly released from prison, Said Mahran returns to a Cairo that has moved on without him. Betrayed years earlier by his wife and by Ilish, the disciple who informed on him and stole both his family and his ideals, and abandoned by the revolutionary mentor whose fine words now ring hollow, Said is consumed by a single purpose: revenge.

But his attempts at retribution go disastrously astray, and he finds himself hunted through the city's streets, cafés, and cemeteries — a thief pursued by the 'dogs' of a society that has no place for him.

Written in an urgent, interior style that draws on stream of consciousness, Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs is a taut existential thriller and a searing parable of betrayal, disillusionment, and the failure of ideals in post-revolutionary Egypt.