Mapped
Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz
Mahfouz builds a single fictional alley, and the whole of scripture and history play out inside it: a founding ancestor in a great house at the desert edge, an endowment fought over by strongmen, and a line of reformers who each try to win the poor their share. The alley is drawn from the Gamaliya of his own childhood, the old Islamic quarter below the Muqattam hills, near the mosque of al-Husayn and the northern gate of Bab al-Futuh.
6 places →
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
The first book of the Alexandria Quartet, in which a schoolteacher looks back on his love for the restless, magnetic Justine, wife of the wealthy Copt Nessim, in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the years before the Second World War. The city is the true protagonist, Durrell's 'capital of memory': the sweep of the Corniche, the Cecil Hotel on the seafront, the crowded cosmopolitan and Arab quarters, and Lake Mareotis south of the town where a duck shoot ends in death.
5 places →
Midaq Alley
Naguib Mahfouz
Almost the whole of Mahfouz's novel happens in one cul-de-sac of old Islamic Cairo, Zuqaq al-Midaq, a real alley off the Sanadiqiyya near al-Azhar. Its café, barber's shop, bakery and the flat of the beautiful, restless Hamida make a world unto itself, jolted by the Second World War and the money of the British camps. When Hamida is lured out of the alley into the modern city, the closed world of Midaq Alley cracks open.
5 places →
Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz
In the Gamaliya quarter of old Cairo, the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad rules his household as a tyrant and lives his nights as a pleasure-seeker, while his cloistered wife Amina and their children chafe against his despotism and the world beyond the latticed windows. The first volume of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy maps the real old city: the family house on Bayn al-Qasrayn, the merchant's shop, the mosque of al-Husayn, the night world of Ezbekiyya, and the streets where the 1919 revolution against the British breaks out.
5 places →
The Egyptian
Mika Waltari
The physician Sinuhe tells the story of his life across the turbulent reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten in fourteenth-century-BC Egypt. Waltari anchors it in the real ancient geography of the Nile: Thebes with its great temple of Amun, the House of Death across the river where Sinuhe learns his craft, Akhenaten's new sun-city of Akhetaten raised in the desert, the old capital of Memphis, and the far cities of the east to which Sinuhe's wanderings carry him.
5 places →
The Yacoubian Building
Alaa Al Aswany
Not the medieval alleys of Islamic Cairo but the European-built downtown of the 1930s, Wust el-Balad: Art Deco blocks, cafes and bars around Talaat Harb and Kasr El Nil, a whole society stacked inside one apartment house from the ground-floor offices to the iron huts on the roof. The map keeps to a few downtown streets, all real, all within a short walk of Talaat Harb Square.
6 places →