Here are 18 books that The Cairo Trilogy fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Cairo Trilogy series.
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I'm a novelist, born and raised in New York City. To train myself to write realistic fiction, I started working in journalism first. I worked for New York magazine for a decade, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of anti-social behavior. Later, I wrote for television shows like Law & Order and Blue Bloods. But writing novels is what it's all about for me. I have nine of them so far. The audience is obviously quite small compared to the number of people who watch TV shows. But that doesn't matter. Nothing else allows you to communicate so directly from the studio in your mind to the theater in someone's else mind.
My first job in journalism was as an assistant to the great New York newspaperman Pete Hamill. He told me to always read people who were better than you and to back up his point he had a shelf of Russian literature in his bathroom. For years, I was too intimidated to read Tolstoy. When I finally did, I was shocked to discover that much of his writing is as accessible as the New York Post. War and Peace is his most famous work, but for me he’s most alive and urgent in his shorter fiction. The title story is among the most harrowing descriptions of death ever, “Kreutzer Sonata” reveals an understanding of the psychopath’s mind that would have Hitchcock and Kubrick whimpering the covers, and “Haji Murad” is a tale of terrorism and betrayal that could come straight from the current Russian war. Some of Tolstoy’s work…
A vibrant translation of Tolstoy’s most important short fiction by the award-winning translators of War and Peace.
Here are eleven masterful stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all told with the evocative power that was Tolstoy’s alone. They include “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” inspired by Tolstoy's own experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, “Hadji Murat,” the novella Harold Bloom called “the best story in the world,” “The Devil,” a fascinating tale of sexual obsession, and the celebrated “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities…
I’ve written fiction for 60 years, scratching the adventure itch for exotic places, high seas, or converging oddities. I have wandered and taken note. The authors I love have influenced my worldview and my writing. I am a reef conservation activist with five volumes of reef photos and political narratives covering reefs worldwide. And I am an Executive Producer of The Dark Hobby, an award-winning feature film exposing the aquarium trade for its devastating impact on reefs worldwide. I live in Maui with my wife Anita, Cookie the dog, Yoyo, Tootsie, Rocky, Buck, Inez and Coco the cats, and Elizabeth the chicken.
All of the Singer Brothers are excellent tales of village life and struggles. Isaac Bashevis Singer could spin a yarn with no seams showing, drawing readers in to personal and social straits. Scum, Meshugah, Shosha, and the rest capture the strife and insanity of the times. Isaac Singer often called his brother I.J. a better writer. Better shmetter; I.J. wrote beautiful tales of folksy subjects, easing as well to the verge. The Brothers Carnovsky will linger for years.
Presents a new, recently discovered, posthumously published novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Certificate and The King of the Fields. 20,000 first printing.
I have been fascinated with travel and adventure stories since I read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I finished a whole Walter Scott book; with a dictionary balanced on one knee because Jeanie Deans decides to walk from Edinburgh to London. Romance? Bah! Humbug! I’d rather journey into The Heart of Darkness, follow the hobbits to Mount Doom, or ride a sandworm with Paul Atreides. Show me a lone traveler thrown into the middle of an unfamiliar, confusing culture and you have my full attention. Naturally, when I started typing out my first manuscript, it just had to be a fantasy adventure about an Iban headhunter.
This is one of those books that I had to put down a couple of times previously because the protagonist’s flaw hit too close to home. Jim is so ashamed of his past cowardice that each time his identity is found out, he will travel farther away from the spreading Western colonies. A Western marauder eventually invades the Malay and Bugis community where he lives, and Jim has to bear the consequence of speaking up for the man in good faith. After so many years, this book is still one of my top favorites because Jim finally stops running and faces his fear. He ultimately becomes the hero that he has always wanted to be.
'To the white men in the waterside business and to the captain of ships he was just Jim - nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced.'
Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman - 'as unflinching as a hero in a book' - who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an Eastern port. His life is blighted: an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, and helps to…
I’ve been fascinated by absurdist comedy and ideas for as long as I can remember. At sixteen, I wrote my first book, Mr A, which followed a man who would turn into a superhero after taking LSD and his talking dog. As an adult, I continue to revel in these types of stories. I brought this passion to my chart-topping debut non-fiction book, where I interviewed several people who believe McDonald’s has interdimensional properties. Now, I hold no bars in fiction writing, having authored a ‘genius of a book’ that follows a talking pencil.
Many of us writers are subject to the terrible cliché of substance abuse, none so much as Charles Bukowski. Having dabbled in the debauched myself, Ham on Rye sadly reflects what life could be like if the idiocy of adolescence continues into adulthood. This book is hilarious, vulgar, shocking, and oddly insightful. Not only is this my favourite Bukowski book, but it’s the book that introduced me to his work and changed my writing forever.
'He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels' LEONARD COHEN
Charles Bukowski is one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who grew up to be the legendary Hank Chinaski of Post Office and Factotum.
Growing up on a diet of The Godfather, The Sopranos, thrillers, and gangster novels, and living in New York City with eye-opening trips to Sicily, I became slightly obsessed with the Mafia. I came to see the American Mafia as a quintessentially American fabric, woven of family, power, immigrants, money, history, loyalty, legacy, and, yes, crime.
Few writers inhabit history, distill it, and convey the feeling of an era with the verve or immediacy of E.L. Doctorow.
In Billy Bathgate, he trains his lens on the 1930s and introduces us to Billy Behan, a fatherless Irish-Jewish kid from the Bronx, who has a chance encounter with New York gangster Dutch Schultz and decides “whatever my life was going to be in this world it would have something to do with Mr. Schultz.”
Add a love triangle, a colorful cast of mobsters, murder, blackmail, a special prosecutor, and you have the propulsive plot and rich characters that power this unforgettable novel.
'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom'
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.
I was raised to believe that I could do everything a man could do, just as Ginger Rodgers did, “backwards and in high heels.” My discovery that social expectations and boundaries for women were vastly different than those for men came as an enormous shock, and struck me as deeply, tragically unfair. I take strength from women in history, as well as from fictional female characters, who passionately pursue roles in a man’s world that are considered transgressive or forbidden. As a glass-ceiling-shattering female film and television director I take inspiration from women who have the gritty determination to live on their own terms. And then tell it as they lived it.
This novel’s power remains intact every time I read it, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift – from the perils of living by one’s looks (my teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world towards women (my young adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (my more recent readings).
Edith Wharton’s novel is a masterpiece, both electrifying and relevant, and worth re-reading as often as possible.
Once you finish the book, watch the Terence Davies-directed film, starring the luminous Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.
A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century-now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan.
Wharton's first literary success-a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy at the turn of the century-is considered by many to be her most important novel, and Lily Bart, her most unforgettable character. Impoverished but well-born, the beautiful and beguiling Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But with her romantic indiscretion, gambling debts, and a maelstrom…
I studied music as an undergraduate and play the cello or the drums most days. Yet when I set out to write Concert Black, I found that there are surprisingly few novels set in the world of the conservatory and the concert hall. To me, these are ideal settings for drama because they are filled with competition, ego, and high art. Novels that pivot on classical music combine two of my great passions and are among my favorite type of book.
Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels are as much about music as they are about the navy.
Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin meet at a chamber music concert in the opening pages of this first novel in the series. The scene prefigures the way they will one day play duets at sea on their cello and violin.
I love how the opening scene uses music to establish their contrasting personalities. Jack, who is all enthusiasm, can’t help himself but beat time to Locatelli’s String Quartet in C Major. Stephen insults Jack by telling him he is ruining the concert; if he’s going to beat the measure, he should at least not rush. What could have led to a duel ends in a lifetime of friendship.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
Writing is about the metaphysical as well as the rational if it’s any good. As an author, I am always more interested in the wreckage of a crisis than the crisis itself—in the aftermath. Survivors search for purpose above all else. They undertake long sojourns, seek spiritual counsel, or find solace in art or politics. As a writer who has dealt with illness for most of my adult life, I think one path that is shared by all these novels is the discovery of agency—over one’s body, one’s choices, and one’s own life and death. There lies meaning.
This is a meta-fictional novel about the fragile state of memory and interpretation.
Stories can save us, and in the case of 13-year-old Briony Tallis, stories can ruin us. A single accusation is enough to destroy her sister, a young man’s life, and their future together. It shows us that the art of writing can be both sacred and profane.
It is a novel inhabited by ghosts, one that taught me the importance of absence in storytelling, of the silences and liminal spaces when writing about epic events. The style obfuscates the plot, then later renders it in vivid detail.
What lives between the lines is critical. It asks if forgiveness and acts of retribution can counter the death that eventually comes for all of us.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a…
I am a fiction writer and currently live in Cairo, where I have lived for over twenty years. I noticed that the way I started telling stories was influenced by learning Arabic and by listening to the stories of the people in the city. My interest in Arabic also led me to read Arabic literature, like A Thousand and One Nights.
I enjoyed Mafouz’s marvelous retelling of the Thousand and One Nights.
Although Mafouz sets the time in mediaeval era, the novel is a
political fable with contemporary overtones for any authoritarian
government.
Arabian Nights and Days,
tells the story of the Sultan, Shahriyar, and his entourage of rotating
police chiefs, spies, and informers. Many of the same characters from A Thousand and One Nights
appear in his version: Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Shahrazad and her
sister, Dunyazad. And characters do tell stories to one another, but
Shahrazad is not as prominent.
The “jinn” or evil spirits do take
over each of the most noble characters, who are tempted by money, sex,
and power. Many “fall into the abyss” either in this world or the next.
There are disappearances, robberies, murders, purges—and those who are in favor might have their fortunes drastically changed in the course of…
The Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade into a novel written in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories from the tradition of The One Thousand and One Nights, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters, who plumbs their depths for timeless truths.
I am a fiction writer and currently live in Cairo, where I have lived for over twenty years. I noticed that the way I started telling stories was influenced by learning Arabic and by listening to the stories of the people in the city. My interest in Arabic also led me to read Arabic literature, like A Thousand and One Nights.
This is a fun, playful novel that completely breaks all of the boundaries—time, gender, country, and fact—not
surprising from Salman Rushdie! It is a dizzying ride, going from the
Ferris wheel, to bumper cars, to the house of mirrors in a theme park.
Rather
than relying so much on the strict frame narrative, Rushdie experiments
with the idea of characters who are overtaken by “the jinn”—a wild,
irrational impulse that perverts existing norms. It is Dunyazad,
Shahrazad’s sister who marries Ibn Rushd, the great philosopher who was
marginalized in 1195 by the Caliph. Rushdie tells the stories of all of
Dunyazad or Dunia’s descendants, as well as the eternal war between Ibn
Rushd and Al-Ghazali, eight hundred years beyond the grave. A fan
of the wacky and weird, Rushdie outdoes himself with the characters in this story.
After a
super-storm, the line between humans and the jinns blurs…
Blending history, mythology and a timeless love story, this is a satirical, magical masterpiece.
In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own comic book creation. Abandoned at the mayor's office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.
Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical,…
