Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, opens his Cairo Trilogy with the household of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a Cairo merchant who rules his wife and children with an iron hand at home while living a double life of pleasure outside it. Set around 1917 to 1919, the novel follows the family's daily routines, marriages, and quiet rebellions as nationalist protests against British rule begin to stir in the streets. Mahfouz draws each family member in full, especially the women confined to the home, and lets the private drama mirror a country on the edge of change. It is a rich, patient portrait of a family and a city.
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What you might want to know about Palace Walk
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The first book of the Cairo Trilogy follows a strict Egyptian merchant and his family through the upheavals of life under British rule after the First World War.
Yes. Palace Walk is the first novel in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, followed by Palace of Desire and Sugar Street.
Yes. Pete Buttigieg included it on his list of ten desert-island books for One Grand Books in 2019.
Palace Walk was written by Naguib Mahfouz, published in 1956 by Doubleday.
Palace Walk is 498 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Palace Walk takes most readers 7 to 11 hours to finish.
Palace Walk is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
