Palace Walk

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.

Amina

The house on Palace Walk

The household

In the tall house on Palace Walk, Amina keeps a household run to her husband's iron rule, rising each night to wait up for him and never once permitted to leave the door. Mahfouz opens in this world of women behind the mashrabiya screens, its rhythms of prayer, coffee and obedience, the confined centre against which every rebellion in the book will push.

The opening chapters

explicit The family house stands on Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), a real street in the historic Gamaliya quarter of Cairo that gives the novel its title; sited there.

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