Back in the dog days of the early twentyfirst century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandrias main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal citys arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of crime, a revolution Karantina.Through three generations of Grand Guignol insanity, Nael Eltoukhys sly psychopomp of a narrator is our guide not only to the teeming cast of pimps, dealers, psychotics, and halfwits and the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, and patriotic, are the rapists and thieves of Alexandrias crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantinatheir Alexandria reimagined as the once and future capitalwhat they believe it to be the revolutionary dream made brick and mortar, flesh and bone?Subversive and hilarious, deft and scalpelsharp, Eltoukhys sprawling epic is a masterpiece of modern Egyptian literature. Mahfouz shaken by the tail, a lunatic dream, a future history that is the sanest thing yet written on Egypts current woes.

Binding: Paperback;308 pages; Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press; Classification: FA; Weight: 576 g; Dimensions: 153 x 229 x 19

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