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Cover of Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk

  • 499 pages · about 8 hours
  • First published 1960
  • 37 editions

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1 About this book

Palace Walk (Arabic: بين القصرين, romanized: Bayn al-Quṣrayn, lit. 'Between Two Palaces') is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and the first installment of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. Originally published in 1956 with the title Bayn al-qasrayn, the book was then translated into English by William M. Hutchins and Olive Kenny, and then published by Doubleday (publisher) in 1990.

The book's Arabic title translates into 'between two palaces'. The setting of the novel is Cairo around the time period of World War I. It begins in 1917, during World War I, and ends in 1919, the year of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. The novel is written in a social realist style and reflects the social and political setting of Egypt in during 1917 to 1919.

  • Middle east
  • Politics and government
  • Law school
  • Nationalism
  • Manners and customs
  • Social conditions
  • Parables
  • Islam

2 About Naguib Mahfouz

1911–2006

Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha (11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described him as a writer "who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Egyptian narrative art that applies to all mankind".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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