The Epic of the Harafish

Author's name: Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz's greatest and most important epic, in which he describes the human soul and its struggle between the search for salvation and the pursuit of pleasure. Ten tales, teeming with life's struggles, sweetness, and temptation, portray the sons of "The Great Survivor" as reformers seeking justice and goodness, each in his own way. They stand up to injustice and struggle against temptation and the impulses of the human soul; they fall and triumph, they corrupt and reform, in an amazing epic in which generations succeed one another over two centuries, from the era of the Great Survivor to Ashour, the last survivor. The novel was published in 1977 and its tales were adapted to the big screen six times in the 1980s and then to the small screen in 2002.