![]() ![]() His tone is boisterous, affable, completely alien to any experience she and her family has with him within these walls. The view had been a companion for her in her solitude and a friend in her loneliness during a long period when she was deprived of friends and companions before her children were born, when for most of the day and night she had been the sole occupant of this large house with its two storeys of spacious rooms with high ceilings, its dusty courtyard and deep well.Īnxious and insecure when her husband is not home, she recites the Qur’an to allay her fears and ward off demons.Ī carriage pulls up in front of the house and she can hear her husband’s voice. Perhaps boredom was an irrelevant concept for a life as monotonous as hers. ![]() ![]() She takes a spot on the latticed balcony overlooking their street – Bayn al-Qasrayn, or Palace Walk – and awaits her husband’s return home from his nightly entertainments. As Egypt struggles towards independence, so to do the younger members of the al-Jawad family struggle for greater personal freedom against oppression from tradition and religion.Įvery night, around midnight, Amina wakes herself a habit formed over twenty-five years of marriage. Considered to be his masterpiece, the trilogy follows the lives of members of the conservative al-Jawad family from the First World War to the Second. Palace Walk is the first novel of Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. ![]()
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