The Yacoubian Building
by Alaa Al Aswany & Humphrey Davies
The Yacoubian Builiding is celebrated, possibly even notorious, for being such a bestseller – originally in Egypt and the Arab world and subsequently in the West, in English and in many other languages. It’s beautifully written, it’s incredibly readable, it’s often very funny and I suspect it will go on being read for many years as a kind of portrait of Egypt on the eve of the events that are taking place now.
