An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo’s old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher’s reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.
About the author
Gamal al-Ghitani, born in 1945, is the author of
Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004),
The Mahfouz Dialogs (AUC Press, 2007),
Traces (AUC Press, 2020) and
Pyramid Texts (AUC Press, 2007). He is editor-in-chief of the literary review Akhbar al-adab.
Farouk Abdel Wahab was Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago. He was the translator of many works of Arabic fiction, including Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Book of Epiphanies (AUC Press, 2012). He won the 2007 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of The Lodging House by Khairy Shalaby (AUC Press, 2008). He died in 2013.
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