On Being Abbas El Abd

by Ahmed Alaidy & Humphrey Davies

This is a wickedly complex tale. People debate what actually takes place in the book. It’s about a terminally grumpy twenty-something negotiating Cairo’s shopping malls and high-rises. The book as a whole reflects a culture that will be familiar to anybody in Egypt, who sits, as so much of Egypt does, at that meeting point between global culture — of the internet and the cellphone and so on — and Egyptian street life, the general craziness (and in the case of this book the literal craziness) of Cairo.