Our neighborhood boys - Naguib Mahfouz

Jijles Al-Jiblaawi in his big house surrounded by gardens and high walls, and around him his grandchildren who compete to get his blessing, and the thugs push these away from his earthly paradise, where his descendants settled outside the walls of the big house, and despite their poverty, they did not stop praying that Al-Jiblaawi would come down to them, leave his isolation, distribute his inheritance, and free them from the thugs' tyranny so that goodness would prevail over everyone. And in every generation, this savior appears whom people cling to and rise up with against the thugs, but greed and ignorance ultimately bring them back to the state of affairs they were in, and poverty and suffering remain their inevitable fate. Mahfouz describes in this wonderful novel the oppression and the people's longing for salvation from themselves, and how principles can change with the fluctuation of human souls, and how good deeds fall under the hands of corruption and corruptors. This novel is among the most famous and most problematic works of the late writer, and the Swedish Academy mentioned it when awarding Naguib Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in Literature.