Women of Karantina: A Novel

Women of Karantina is a satiric novel about crime & excess set in a future Alexandria, that has been widely praised for its inventiveness, pace, & subversive humor.

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 & Injy set about rebuilding, & 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, & half-wits & the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, & patriotic, are the rapists & thieves of Alexandria's crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantina-their Alexandria reimagined as the once & future capital-what they believe it to be: the revolutionary dream made brick & mortar, flesh & bone?

Subversive & hilarious, deft & 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.

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Noel Eltoukhy, a 36-year-old Egyptian writer who was born in Kuwait, graduated from the Hebrew Section in the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University in Egypt. His first collection of short stories was published in 2003, & he is the author of four novels. He is also a journalist, blogger, & a translator of books from Hebrew into Arabic.

Robin Moger studied Egyptology & Arabic at Oxford University before working as a journalist in Cairo for six years. He is the translator of A Dog with No Tail by Hamdi Abu Golayyel (AUC Press, 2009)