أبناء الجبلاوي

All the books of Naguib Mahfouz have disappeared, perhaps forever. Kibriya', a calligrapher who is in love with the eccentric Nagwa and who is writing the memoirs of a strange old man in a home for the elderly, asks where they could have gone: taken up by mysterious beings, hidden by a spell, or erased by the same extremists who once tried to kill the writer. Mahfouz's characters seem to turn up in the streets and corridors, and the novel keeps asking whether Kibriya' is real or a figure invented by a writer, mixing reality and fiction, life and art, love and corruption in a society on the verge of collapse.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

470 pages in the original

Genres

Speculative (assigned by AI)

Set in

Egypt

First published

2009 by Dar al-Ain

Author's age

42 when first published

ISBN

9789776231917 (original)