Continuing the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad and his family, this is a fascinating look at Egypt in the 1920s. Increased personal freedoms mix tenuously with traditions of family control, as two of Ahmad's sons court alluring women. Palace of Desire continues Mahfouz's epic family saga, as al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination while the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s.

Originally published in Arabic in 1957 as Qasr al-Shawq. English translation copyright 1991 by The American University in Cairo Press. Naguib Mahfouz was one of the most prominent writers of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century. He was born in 1911 in Cairo and began writing at the age of seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939. Throughout his career, he wrote nearly forty novel-length works and hundreds of short stories. In 1988 Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2006.