Books set in Egypt

The early 1960s: Nasser’s police close in on friends who meet each evening in Alexandria.

A Jewish family’s Alexandria, from the uncles who arrived in 1905 to the exile of 1965.

A Coptic boy grows up in the many-tongued Alexandria of the 1930s and the war.

An old journalist and the guests of an Alexandria boarding house, all drawn to its maid.

Alexandria in the Second World War, as the narrator comes back and loves the painter Clea.

A doctor’s notes turn the story of Justine inside out, in the same Alexandria.

A British diplomat’s view of Alexandria’s Copts, their plot, and the love he left there.

A poor teacher loves the elusive Justine in the many-tongued Alexandria of the 1930s.

Alexandria’s streets, cafés and old kings, in the poems Durrell wove into his Quartet.

The city’s two thousand years and a walk through its streets, by Forster in wartime.

The young who filled Tahrir Square in 2011, and the men who crushed them.

A faded downtown Cairo block, from the old pasha’s flat to the families on its roof.

An English widow loves an Egyptian nationalist in 1900, pieced together in 1990s Cairo.

Five thousand years of Cairo, from the pharaohs to its traffic, told by a resident.

A Syrian Catholic family of fez makers rises in Cairo, from the 1890s to Nasser.

A dying historian remembers her lover, a tank officer, in wartime Cairo and the desert.

1488–1492: a boy’s childhood in Granada, until the city falls and his family flees.

Cairo in the desert war: a young wife, her husband’s circle, and a soldier at the front.

1517: a police chief’s spies watch Mamluk Cairo as the Ottomans close in.

The 1920s: the merchant’s son Kamal loses his faith and his first love in Cairo.

The 1930s and the war: the grandsons split between Islamists and communists in Cairo.

1917: a merchant rules his family like a tyrant in old Cairo, as revolt stirs.

A professor who chose poverty, a murder in a brothel, and the idle, happy poor of Cairo.

One Cairo alley in the Second World War, and a girl who leaves it for British soldiers.

The women, slave market and Ramadan nights of Cairo, then Beirut and Constantinople.

The 14th century BC: a doctor’s life in Thebes and in Akhenaten’s new city of the sun.

2000 BC: murders in a priest’s household on the west bank at Thebes.

A rich bride is shot on a Nile steamer bound from Aswan, with Poirot aboard.

A blind boy in an Upper Egypt village, then a student at al-Azhar in Cairo.

1849–50: the young Flaubert up the Nile by boat, after the baths and dancers of Cairo.

Cairo, Luxor and Philae in 1907, as the first Aswan dam begins to drown the temple.

A mummy found in a tomb at Thebes holds a papyrus, the story of her love for a pharaoh.