It was originally published in Arabic in 1957.

A masterpiece, albeit a wordy, very leisurely one, this family saga is well served by a scintillating translation that exposes English-language readers to an Egyptian Balzac. Palace of Desire ( Arabic:, romanized : Qar ash-Shq) is a novel by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and the second installment of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. The narrative simmers with domestic turmoil, feuding in-laws, political talk of Egypt's quest for independence in the 1920s, women in a male-dominated society committing acts of self-assertion.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the bullying, pompous, belching, self-adoring patriarch first met in Palace Walk, reduces wife Amina to a tireless domestic beast of burden given to ``angry spells.'' Another son, sensitive idealist Kamal, who idolizes the father he fears, plays out a mad, unrequited, pathetic crush on a haughty aristocratic woman. The second part, Palace of Desire, begins its story five years later in 1924, witness to the British negotiation with Saad Zaghlul of the Wafd Party. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mahfouz pulls off a daring plot with gleeful dramatic irony in this, the second volume of his Cairo Trilogy. Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, the first part of his Cairo Trilogy, begins in 1917 during the First World War, ending in 1919 with the outbreak of the nationalist revolution. The Nobel Prizewinning writer’s masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. A sanctimonious tyrant of a father discovers that his mistress, whom he keeps on a houseboat, is secretly married to his dissolute, just-divorced son. Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time.

Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz