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Back in the dog days of the early twenty-first century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandria’s main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal city’s arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of crime, a revolution: Karantina.
Through three generations of Grand Guignol insanity, Nael Eltoukhy’s sly psychopomp of a narrator is our guide not only to the teeming cast of pimps, dealers, psychotics, and half-wits and the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, and patriotic, are the rapists and thieves of Alexandria’s crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantina—their Alexandria reimagined as the once and future capital—what they believe it to be: the revolutionary dream made brick and mortar, flesh and bone?
Subversive and hilarious, deft and scalpel-sharp, Eltoukhy’s sprawling epic is a masterpiece of modern Egyptian literature. Mahfouz shaken by the tail, a lunatic dream, a future history that is the sanest thing yet written on Egypt’s current woes.
"There is no doubt that you will encounter much hilarity here, in Nael Eltoukhy's Women of Karantina it is as enjoyable as a cold drink when thirsty . . . [and uses] humor that is critical, sarcastic, and extremely clever."—al-Tahrir
"Women of Karantina is a totally different experience. Although a lot of its dialogue and details draw on Egyptian life in recent decades, it is ruled by a logic entirely of its own that coherently pulls the reader into its world."—al-Mudun
"Darkly funny. . . [Eltoukhy] simultaneously revels in and mourns the dark underbelly of Alexandria, where the locals live and fight. This is a side of Alexandria that is hardly glimpsed, let alone explored with Eltoukhy's brand of incisive humor."—Chicago Tribune
"An exciting and original work, which represents and important contribution to contemporary Egyptian and Arab Literature."—Banipal
"Peopled with believable characters doing unbelievable things, and written with a light, satirical touch"—Financial Times