August Book Sense Pick
A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed ‘scientist of women.’ A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, scheming to own property. A corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify taking a mistress.
All live in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor slowly decaying in the smog and hubbub of downtown Cairo, Egypt. In the course of this unforgettable novel, these disparate lives converge, careening inexorably toward an explosive conclusion. Tragicomic, passionate, shockingly frank in its sexuality, and brimming with an extraordinary, embracing human compassion, The Yacoubian Building is a literary achievement of the first order.

The Yacoubian Building: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Al Aswany, Alaa

United States

Harper-perennial

From Alaa Al Aswany, the author of the highly-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building, comes a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition set in the midwestern city with a cast of American and Arab characters achingly human in their desires and needs. Chicago offers an illuminating portrait of America—a complex, often contradictory land in which triumph and failure, opportunity and oppression, licentiousness and tender love, small dramas and big dreams, coexist.

Chicago: A Novel

Harper

Egyptian and American lives collide on a college campus in post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound in the extraordinary second novel from the highly acclaimed author of The Yacoubian Building. This is a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition, pulsating and alive with a rich and unforgettable cast of American and Arab characters who are achingly human in their desires and needs. Beautifully rendered, this is an illuminating portrait of America, a complex, often contradictory land in which triumph and failure, opportunity and oppression, small dramas and big dreams coexist. Chicago is a powerfully engrossing novel of culture and individuality from one of the most original voices in contemporary world literature.

Alaa Al Aswany has won resounding critical acclaim for his deft and moving portrayals of the lives of contemporary Egyptians who constantly examine their relationship with Egypt's history, religion, class, and gender distinctions. In Friendly Fire he once again demonstrates an extraordinary empathy for lost and searching souls as he focuses on the exquisite emotions of everyday life. In "The Kitchen Boy" and "Dearest Sister Makarim," Al Aswany explores the hypocrisy of the class divide. The brief and tender "Izzat Amin Iskandar" is a heartrending view of youthful hope. And in the unforgettable novella "The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers," the narrator carries us along a troubling journey through his painful relationships with his artist father and his self-centered mother, en route to a devastating collision of temptation and morality. Here are stories of generational conflict, love, repression, and the clash of Western and Arab ideals, all beautifully rendered by a true modern master.

Friendly Fire: Stories

Contemporary

' Glorious' Observer 
' Amazing ' Andr� Aciman 
' Masterly ' Sunday Times 
' Blistering ' Financial Times 
General Alwany is a pious man who loves his family. He also tortures and kills enemies of the state.\nUnder the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is gripped by cronyism, religious hypocrisy, and the oppressive military. Now, however, the regime faces its greatest crisis. The idealistic young from different backgrounds - engineers, teachers, medical students, and among them the general's daughter - have come together to challenge the status quo.\nEuphoria mounts as Mubarak is toppled and love blossoms across class divides, but can it last?\n'Rooted in first-hand experience, this searing account of the short-lived 2011 Egyptian revolution blends knockabout satire with real polemical anger.' Daily Mail 
'A powerful book in the vein of a great Russian or South American social novel . . . Al Aswany is a writer of great talent, a rare man whose courage is not merely literary.' Le Figaro

The Republic of False Truths

FABER ET FABER

From the most popular Egyptian novelist of his generation ( a suitable heir to the mantle worn by Naguib Mahfouz "The Guardian"), a rollicking, exuberant and powerfully moving story of a family swept up by social unrest in post World War II Cairo. Once a respected landowner, Abd el-Aziz Gaafar fell into penury and moved his family to Cairo, where he was forced into menial work at the Automobile Club a refuge of colonial luxury for its European members. There, Alku, the lifelong Nubian retainer of Egypt s corrupt and dissolute king, lords it over the staff, a squabbling but tight-knit group, who live in perpetual fear, as they are thrashed for their mistakes, their wages dependent on Alku s whims. When, one day, Abd el-Aziz stands up for himself, he is beaten. Soon afterward, he dies, as much from shame as from his injuries, leaving his widow and four children further impoverished. The family s loss propels them down different paths: the responsible son, Kamel, takes over his late father s post in the Club s storeroom, even as his law school friends seduce him into revolutionary politics; Mahmud joins his brother working at the Club but spends his free time sleeping with older women for a fee, which he splits with his partner in crime, his devil-may-care workout buddy and neighbor, Fawzy; their greedy brother Said breaks away to follow ambitions of his own; and their only sister, Saleha, is torn between her dream of studying mathematics and the security of settling down as a wife and saving her family. It is at the Club, too, that Kamel s dangerous politics will find the favor and patronage of the king s seditious cousin, an unlikely revolutionary plotter cum bon vivant. Soon, both servants and masters will be subsumed by the brewing social upheaval. And the Egyptians of the Automobile Club will face a stark choice: to live safely, but without dignity, or to fight for their rights and risk everything. Full of absorbing incident, and marvelously drawn characters, Alaa Al Aswany s novel gives us Egypt on the brink of changes that resonate to this day. It is an irresistible confirmation of Al Aswany s reputation as one of the Middle East s most beguiling storytellers and insightful interpreters of the human spirit."

The Automobile Club of Egypt

Literary

Thorndike Press Large Print

As the Egyptian revolution unfolded throughout 2011 and the ensuing years, no one was better positioned to comment on it―and try to push it in productive directions―than best-selling novelist and political commentator Alaa Al-Aswany. For years a leading critic of the Mubarak regime, Al-Aswany used his weekly newspaper column for Al-Masry Al-Youm to propound the revolution’s ideals and to confront the increasingly troubled politics of its aftermath. This book presents, for the first time in English, all of Al-Aswany’s columns from the period, a comprehensive account of the turmoil of the post-revolutionary years, and a portrait of a country and a people in flux. Each column is presented along with a context-setting introduction, as well as notes and a glossary, all designed to give non-Egyptian readers the background they need to understand the events and figures that Al-Aswany chronicles. The result is a definitive portrait of Egypt today―how it got here, and where it might be headed.

Democracy is the Answer: Egypt's Years of Revolution

History

Middle East

Gingko

The study of dictatorship in the West has acquired an almost exotic dimension. But authoritarian regimes remain a painful reality for billions of people worldwide who still live under them, their freedoms violated and their rights abused. They are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, corruption, ignorance, and injustice. What is the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power, even when reviled and mocked by those they govern? In this deeply considered and at times provocative short work, Alaa Al Aswany tells us that, as with any disease, to understand the syndrome of dictatorship we must first consider the circumstances of its emergence, along with the symptoms and complications it causes in both the people and the dictator.

The Dictatorship Syndrome

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Haus Publishing

El Edificio Yacobián: Una novela sobre un inmueble de El Cairo y las vidas de sus habitantes. (Littera) (Spanish Edition)

Maeva Ediciones

The bestselling author of he Yacaoubian Building and hicago turns his attention to current affairs in Egypt.In the novels and short stories of Alaa Al Aswany, characters struggle with class differences, police brutality, poverty, sexual harassment, and political corruption; now, in a new collection of the weekly newspaper columns previously published in Arabic, Al Aswany considers these same issues that torment modern Egyptian society. He has a great deal to say about one of the most pressing questions on everyone's mind: who will be the next president of Egypt, and how will he be elected? He discusses the moral ambiguity of appointed politicians, the suitability of democratic reforms in a Muslim society, and the inherent contradiction in the actions of the religiously observant policeman who tortures or the man who harasses women. Critical, controversial, and straightforward, Al Aswany asks his government to serve the people, and the people to demand what they deserve.

On the State of Egypt: A Novelist's Provocative Reflections (A Tahrir Studies Edition)

Wright, Jonathan

The American University in Cairo Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Al Aswany, Alaa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Al Aswany, Alaa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Al Aswany, Alaa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Yacoubian Building: A Novel

Chicago: A Novel

Chicago: A Novel

Friendly Fire: Stories

The Republic of False Truths

The Automobile Club of Egypt

Democracy is the Answer: Egypt's Years of Revolution

The Dictatorship Syndrome

El Edificio Yacobián: Una novela sobre un inmueble de El Cairo y las vidas de sus habitantes. (Littera) (Spanish Edition)

On the State of Egypt: A Novelist's Provocative Reflections (A Tahrir Studies Edition)