100 Best Egypt Books of All Time

Anne Thériault

@annfosterwriter Omg isn’t this book the best?? [source]

Humphrey Davies

The Yacoubian Builiding is celebrated, possibly even notorious, for being a real bestseller — originally in Egypt and the Arab world and subsequently in the West, in English and in many other languages. It tells the story of a building in downtown Cairo, and the changes that have affected the building and its inhabitants. So it encapsulates the last 80 years of Egyptian history and it provides a series of extremely sharply drawn sketches of what you might call archetypal figures of our day. You have the ageing aristocrat; you have the doorkeeper’s son who becomes a terrorist when his career ambitions are thwarted by the system. There’s a corrupt mega-businessman who winds up trying to battle the government when it wants to take what he considers too big a bite of his business — and a whole range of other poor and middle class characters who are adapting to the situation as best they can. It’s beautifully written; it’s incredibly readable; it’s often very funny — and I suspect it will go on being read for many years as a kind of portrait of Egypt on the eve of the events that are taking place now. [source]

Joan Boixados

The book I enjoyed more to read was The Egyptian by Mika Waltari. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read it in its original version, suomi, but the translation into catalan was brilliant. Besides the fact that it was my mum’s recommendation, I am sure I enjoyed it because of its sense of adventure, open-mindedness and ultimately, freedom. [source]

Tarek Osman

I think first of all that it is a great literary treat. I believe it is a really captivating novel. But I think the real importance of The Cairo Trilogy is that arguably if you want to choose one city within the whole of the Arab world that is representative of the history of the Arab world in the past few hundred years I would say that it is Cairo. Damascus might be a contender but I think Cairo would be my choice. [source]

The Big Pharaoh

Just knew Egyptian American and Jewish author Lucette Lagnado has passed away. Author of one of the best book I’ve read: The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. I remember an email she sent me after reading one of my blogs. I was thrilled to read her name in my inbox. May she RIP [source]

Roy Moxham

He’s a much better writer of factual books than fiction. It’s about him researching these documents that originally came to Cambridge University out of Egypt, and they are documents pertaining to Jews who were based in Egypt but were travelling to do business in Southern India in medieval times. He writes extremely beautifully about life in an Egyptian village where he stays and the people he meets, and the stress when their young men are caught up in the war between Iraq and Iran. It’s an amazing story really and it’s amazing how these documents were preserved. Apparently, for Jews it’s considered wrong to throw away documents that have God’s name written on them, so they had these huge boxes the size of houses in Cairo and if you wanted to get rid of anything you just threw it into these and they accumulated over centuries and centuries. It’s extraordinary that they survived in this way. So it’s a personal piece of historical research. He eventually goes to India as well and tries to find connections with people who had gone over there. [source]

Stephen Kinsella

@gavreilly @SLSingh Love that book [source]

Humphrey Davies

Taxi is a delightful book. It’s 58 short passages each of which is a taxi ride during which the author gets into conversation with the driver. These conversations range over just about every aspect of Egyptian life, but with a very strong political flavour too — which is the way that conversations with taxi drivers tend to go. It’s very much the view from the street. Obviously the writer is a sophisticated person — he’s a journalist, and he doesn’t try to come off as anything else. But the taxi drivers are taxi drivers, and they represent a wide range of opinion and some are very admirable and some are absolute shits. It’s written largely in Egyptian colloquial, rather than the literary language, and that gives it a lot of the flavour of real life. It rings very, very true – and it’s deceptively easy reading. It’s fun to read but covers a lot of very important subjects in Egyptian society. [source]