—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, The Daily Star (Beirut)
“Richly peppered with complex characters…. A provocative survey of the social and political pressures of the present that has many Egyptians looking too nostalgically to their more tolerant and hopeful past.”
—Donna Bryson, Associated Press
“The publication of The Yacoubian Building has enriched the art of the Egyptian novel.”
—Gamal al-Ghitani, author of Zayni Barakat
“Delves into a mix of power, corruption, sex, exploitation, poverty, and extremism…. [The Yacoubian Building] lucidly captures the varied aspects of Egyptian life: straight, gay, rich, poor, powerful, and powerless.”
—Egypt Today
“The novel’s elegant prose touches sensitive nerves in its look at the country’s corruption and religious fanaticism…. No other Egyptian, or Arab writer for that matter, has so boldly broken through the literary stagnation of the last fifty years by addressing these themes. Except perhaps Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate who penned The Cairo Trilogy in the 1950s.”
—Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Foreign Policy magazine
Credits
Cover design by Chin Yee Lai
Cover photograph by Magum Photos
Copyright
THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING. Copyright © 2002 by Alaa Al Aswany. English translation copyright © 2004 by Humphrey Davies. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition July 2006 ISBN 9780061758829
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aswany. 'Ala'.
The Yacoubian Building : a novel / Alaa Al Aswany ; [translated by Humphrey Davies].
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-06-087813-4 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-087813-9 (pbk.)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Translator's Note
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Glossary
Qur'anic References
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Translator
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher