Murad Al-Aref

Author Name: Ahmed Sabry Aboulfotouh

This novel takes us on a journey with three characters caught between their dreams and the constraints of their reality: the journalist "Murad Al-Aref," who defines himself as a "novelist without a novel"; "Laila Tatto," a beautiful woman who adorns women at private parties in a Gulf country; and "Hibatullah," the wife of a famous critic fifty years her senior. When Murad meets Laila on an airplane, he realizes that she is the character he dreams of writing about in his novel. In an engaging narrative, novelist Ahmed Sabry Aboulfotouh has managed to make us intertwine with the fates of the three protagonists, revealing much about the hidden depths of human beings, the suffering of people consumed by ambition in an indifferent world, and the blurring lines between a writer's real life and their imagined narratives. "Murad Al-Aref" is a novel about love, success, writing, confronting reality, and whether a person can rewrite their destiny. Ahmed Sabry Aboulfotouh is an Egyptian novelist who studied law at Cairo University and worked in the judiciary until he became a public prosecutor. He then resigned and worked as a lawyer. His famous quintet "The Epic of Al-Saraswa" is among his most prominent works, and he won the Sawiris Cultural Award for Novel - Senior Writers category for its first part. He has also published thirteen other novels, most notably "The Owner of the World," "Sayed Al-Ahl's Agenda," and "Breskal," among other works that received widespread acclaim from critics and readers.