The Yacoubian Building by Ala Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building by Ala Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since its namesake was built on one of downtown Cairo's main boulevards. From the pious son of the building's doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt - where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail. Ala Al Aswany's novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained the world's best selling novel in the Arabic language since.

Ala Al Aswany was born in 1957. A dentist whose first office was in the Yacoubian Building, Al Aswany has written prolifically for Egyptian newspapers across the political spectrum on literature, politics, and social issues. Humphrey Davies earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the translator of Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz (AUC Press, 2003).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9789774248627
ISBN 10	9774248627
Title	The Yacoubian Building
Author	Ala Al Aswany
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	The American University in Cairo Press
Year published	2004-11-30
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable