Miramar

"With Miramar we are in the hands of a considerable novelist, and one who knows his country's complex problems, and complex soul, profoundly."--John Fowles

Once again, Naguib Mahfouz has fashioned a highly charged, tightly written tale of intersecting lives that provides readers with both an engaging and powerful story as well as a vivid portrait of life in Egypt in the late 1960s. Set in Alexandria, Miramar tells the violent, tragic story of the former grand hostelry Miramar, now a pension run by an elderly grand dame and a young country girl.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, his works range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Over a career that lasted more than five decades, he wrote 33 novels, 13 short story anthologies, numerous plays, and 30 screenplays. 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 awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so. He died in August 2006.