Sugar Street

Sugar Street is the final volume of Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize-winning Cairo Trilogy, carrying the story of the al-Jawad family from the mid-1930s into the years of the Second World War. The once-formidable patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is now old and ailing, unable even to climb the stairs of his own house, while his wife Amina keeps their diminished world together. His son Kamal, the dreamer of the earlier books, has settled into life as a disillusioned bachelor schoolteacher, still turning over the questions of faith and meaning that once tormented him.

It is in the grandchildren that Mahfouz locates the future of Egypt. One grandson becomes a committed communist, another a devout Muslim Brotherhood activist, and a third builds a political career through a compromising relationship with a powerful patron. Their rival convictions — and the arrests, risks, and betrayals that follow — mirror the ideological struggles pulling at the nation itself as history, including the war and the death of loved ones, breaks in upon the family.

Elegiac and quietly devastating, Sugar Street brings Mahfouz's great saga to a close, watching one family's decline and renewal stand in for the birth pangs of a modern Egypt.