Autorentext
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, the 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. Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.Diana Matar is a photographer whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, The British Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, and thirty other institutions. She is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant and the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art and is the author of two monographs, Evidence (2014) and My America (2024), which was shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Photo-text Book Award.Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Klappentext
FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR - WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HISHAM MATAR

After an assassination attempt in his twilight years, Naguib Mahfouz became a recluse, going out rarely and receiving visitors in his hotel. Cautious and in ill-health, he could only roam the city freely in his dreams.

In this mix of vivid vignettes linked together by the author's precisely rendered nightly wanderings through Cairo, figures from Mahfouz's personal life blend with his anxieties about Egypt's political past and future.

Each dream is layered with philosophical musings, hopes and desperations, fidelities and disappointments. Over the course of the book they build to a lush and complex picture of Mahfouz' subconscious.

A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling' GUARDIAN