broken spirit

Author's name: Muhammad Al-Mansi Qandil

"Broken Souls" is a classic example of 1960s literature, conveying all the characteristics and features of the 1960s, from intellectual and political repression to ruthless classism, the bitterness of defeat, psychological breakdown, the vicious circle of frustration, dreamy love stories, opportunism, and the exploitation of the dreams of the poor classes. All this places it in the position of the mother novel of this generation, with all its emotions, details, tragedies, and dreams. On the other hand, the story of Fatima and Ali was much harsher than the painful reality. Mohamed El-Mansi Qandil is an Egyptian novelist, born in El-Mahalla El-Kubra in 1949. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Mansoura in 1975, but became preoccupied with rewriting heritage, so he retired from medicine and devoted himself to writing. His novels "Moon over Samarkand" (2006), which won the Sawiris Prize for Literature and was translated into English, were published by Dar El-Shorouk, and "A Cloudy Day in the West Bank" (2010), which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.