Everyman's Library #248: The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street

From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

An extraordinary collection of renowned world literature including Nobel Prize winners and beloved fiction writers in beautiful, enduring hardcover editions with elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers.

Titles included:

The African Trilogy by Chinua Achebe

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

 

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize—winning writer’s masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.

 

The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons–the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.

 

Throughout the trilogy, the family’s trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels. In 1988, Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza.