Morning and evening talk

Arrived in Cairo days before the French campaign, and he was in Alexandria from a family of perfumers. When the plague spread, it destroyed its members, leaving no man or woman except him. The country hated him, so he decided to head towards Cairo. He had some money with him, and a rare trait for that time — he knew how to read and write, taught at the religious institute before he was cut off from it to help his father in the perfumery. He wandered in Cairo for a while until he found refuge in a house in Bab El-Ghuriya, and he also found work as a cashier at the Waraq Agency. He was a young man, strong-bodied, dark-skinned, with clear features. A new literary masterpiece woven by the legend of the novel "Naguib Mahfouz" through five generations spanning two centuries, from the time of the French campaign against Egypt, when the great grandfather and founder of the family, "Yazid Al-Masri," came from Alexandria, which was struck by the plague at that time, to Cairo; and up to the 1980s, where the generation of grandchildren’s grandchildren documents the social history of the Egyptians, and the political and economic influences on it. A human river extending, emphasizing the course of life and the inevitability of death. In this work, Mahfouz departs from the traditional chronological framework of events, focusing on the individual rather than the event, dividing the novel into characters arranged alphabetically. While the grandson appears at the beginning, we reach the original founder at the end, as if indicating humanity’s constant search for its origin and fundamental formation. He guides us through two centuries of the family’s life and Cairo’s history, tracing the Egyptian family tree.