CBE Book Group Meeting: Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz

Palace of Desire is the second novel (The CBE Book Group read the first novel Palace Walk a few years ago.) Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent Cairo Trilogy, an epic family saga of colonial Egypt that is considered his masterwork.  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. In Palace of Desire, his rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s.  “All the magic, mystery, and suffering of Egypt in the 1920s are conveyed on a human scale.” —The New York Times Book Review Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.

The CBE Book Group will meet in-person at the home of a CBE member to discuss Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz.  Please contact linda.quigley298@gmail.com for the address.