The Republic of False Truths
Alaa Al Aswany author S R Fellowes translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Faber & Faber
Published:7th Jul '22
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'Al Aswany is a voice worth hearing from a country of which we know far too little.' Sunday Times
'Al Aswany is a voice worth hearing from a country of which we know far too little.' - Sunday Times
'Glorious'Observer
'Amazing' André Aciman
'Masterly' Sunday Times
'Blistering' Financial Times
General Alwany is a pious man who loves his family. He also tortures and kills enemies of the state.
Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is gripped by cronyism, religious hypocrisy, and the oppressive military. Now, however, the regime faces its greatest crisis. The idealistic young from different backgrounds - engineers, teachers, medical students, and among them the general's daughter - have come together to challenge the status quo.
Euphoria mounts as Mubarak is toppled and love blossoms across class divides, but can it last?
'Rooted in first-hand experience, this searing account of the short-lived 2011 Egyptian revolution blends knockabout satire with real polemical anger.' Daily Mail
'A powerful book in the vein of a great Russian or South American social novel . . . Al Aswany is a writer of great talent, a rare man whose courage is not merely literary.' Le Figaro
'A masterly panorama of doomed revolution, Aswany's novel puts him in the company of writers such as Joseph Conrad or Mario Vargas Llosa as an outstanding fictional confronter of authoritarianism and its entrenched evils.' - Sunday Times
'Exile has only whetted the blade of [Aswany's] satire . . a glorious, humane novel that chronicles the failure of a revolution and its personal cost without ever quite extinguishing hope of a better future.' - Observer
'Rooted in first-hand experience, this searing account of the short-lived 2011 Egyptian revolution blends knockabout satire with real polemical anger.' - Daily Mail
'A blistering, bold dissection of a failed revolution, and of the disenchantment and dissent that inevitably follow.' - Financial Times
'An amazing portrait of fanaticism and cynicism among Egyptian powermongers.' - Andre Aciman, Guardian
'An engaging, provocative and, ultimately, frustrating tour of the revolution, from its gestation to its bloody aftermath.' - The Economist
'A powerful book in the vein of a great Russian or South American social novel . . . Al Aswanyis a writer of great talent, a rare man whose courage is not merely literary.' - Le Figaro
'One of our greatest contemporary writers or, even better, the Pharaoh of the literary arts . . . A wonderful novel . . . Breathtaking . . . The Republic of False Truths is also a novel of ferocious comedy and dissent; Al Aswany attacks the hypocrisy of power, politics, and every aspect of religion, including its relationship to sexuality.' - France Culture
'Brave, sobering, provocative, and thoroughly absorbing.' - Booklist
'In telling the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 through the viewpoint of a variety of Cairenes both for and against, Alaa Al Aswany holds out the slender straw of hope against the slashing shears of repression. ' - Spectator
'Exhilarating in its storytelling and devastating in its societal critique . . . an evocative and informed account of an important moment in Egyptian society.' - Irish Times
ISBN: 9780571347612
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 27mm
Weight: 381g
464 pages
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