SOURCE: A review of Sugar Street, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 203–04.

In the following review, Allen discusses the third book in “Cairo Trilogy,” Sugar Street, and describes how the trilogy has developed since the first book, Palace Walk.

Those readers in the Western world who have enjoyed the process of being introduced through Naguib Mahfouz's great family saga to the life and culture of Egyptian society between the two world wars will need little incentive to follow the tale to its conclusion in the final volume of The Cairo Trilogy under review here. Al-Sukkariyyah, the third novel in the series, originally published in 1957 and now translated as Sugar Street, rounds off the narrative in a manner common to all realistic sagas such as this, neatly tying up most of the loose ends. The family patriarch, Ahmad ‘Abd al-Gawwad, dies one night during an air raid...