The Automobile Club Of Egypt

Author: Alaa Al Aswany

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $32.99 AUD
  • : 9781926428390
  • : Penguin Books Australia
  • : Hamish Hamilton
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  • : August 2015
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  • : Australia
  • : 32.99
  • : September 2015
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  • : books

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  • : Alaa Al Aswany
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  • : Paperback
  • : 915
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  • : 448
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Barcode 9781926428390
9781926428390

Description

From Egypt's most popular novelist - an absorbing, exuberant and powerfully moving story of a family swept up by social unrest in post-World War II Cairo. Abd el-Aziz Gaafar, formerly a well-respected landowner now in the grip of penury, moved his family to Cairo and took on menial work at the Automobile Club - a place of refuge and luxury for its European members, a place where Egyptians may appear only as servants. Alku, the lifelong Nubian servant of Egypt's corrupt king, runs the show in all but name. The servants, a squabbling, humorous, and deeply human group, live in a perpetual state of fear: beaten for their mistakes, their wages dependent on Alku's whims. When Abd el-Aziz's pride gets the better of him and he stands up for himself, his death - as much from shame as from his injuries after Alku has him beaten - leaves his widow further impoverished, and two of his sons obliged to work in the Club. As the family is drawn into the turbulent politics - public and private - both servants and masters are subsumed by Egypt's social upheaval. Soon the Egyptians of the Automobile Club face a stark choice: to live safely but without dignity as servants, or to fight for their rights and risk everything. 'Al Aswany is a world writer, making Egyptian concerns into human ones and beautifully illuminating our always extraordinary and sometimes sad and baffling world.' The Times (London)

Author description

Alaa Al Aswany was born in 1957. A dentist by profession, Al Aswany is the author of the bestselling novel The Yacoubian Building, Chicago and the novella and short story collection Friendly Fire.