Palace Walk is the first volume of Naguib Mahfouz's celebrated Cairo Trilogy and the foundation of the work that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Set in Cairo between 1917 and the Egyptian revolution of 1919, it is a richly detailed portrait of one middle-class family living under British occupation and the unbending rule of its patriarch.
At the center stands al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, a merchant who governs his household with absolute authority — his wife Amina has scarcely left the house in twenty-five years — while pursuing a secret nightlife of music, wine, and women beyond its walls. Around him move his children: the sensual, weak-willed Yasin; the idealistic law student Fahmy, drawn to the nationalist cause; the dreamy young Kamal; and the daughters Khadija and Aisha, whose marriages test the family's fragile order. As the movement for Egyptian independence gathers force in the streets, the political and the domestic begin to collide.
Written in a patient, deeply humane social realism, Palace Walk immerses the reader in the sights, rituals, and tensions of a vanishing Cairo. It is both an intimate family drama and the opening movement of one of the great achievements of twentieth-century Arabic literature.