Alaa Al Aswany

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.

Sex, money and politics are the driving forces of society in this new novel from bestselling author Alaa al Aswany. A medley of Egyptian and American lives collides on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center in a post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound. Among the players are an atheistic anti-establishment American professor of the sixties generation, whose relationship with a younger African-American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance; a veiled PhD candidate whose conviction in the code of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society; an emigre who has fervently embraced his new American identity, but who cannot escape his Egyptian roots when faced with the issue of his daughter's 'honour'; an Egyptian State Security informant who spouts religious doctrines while hankering after money and power; and a dissident student poet who comes to America with the sole aim of financing his literary aspirations, but whose experience in Chicago turns out to be more than he bargained for. This tightly plotted page-turner is set far from the downtown Cairo of al Aswany's ‘The Yacoubian Building’, but is no less unflinching an examination of contemporary Egyptian lives.

This exceptional Egyptian novel â?? as mesmerising as it is controversial â?? caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in Arabic.

The lives and fortunes of the inhabitants of the Yacoubian Building, a once elegant, Art Deco apartment building in the heart of downtown Cairo, intertwine as the destinies of a fading aristocrat, voluptuous siren, devout young doorman, secretly gay newspaper editor, roof-squatting tailor, and corrupt politician come together. Reader's Guide available. Original. 40,000 first printing.