The Quarter Naguib Mahfouz Free Download

Are you still looking for The Quarter by Naguib Mahfouz free download PDF or EPUB online?

Then you have come to the right place to get hold of this 2019 book by the preeminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.

Click on the link mentioned below, it will instantly take to download the free e-book “The Quarter“.

This is the real deal.

It is not from one of those sites (Pinterest, www.yumpu, etc) which claimed to offer free download of “The Quarter”.

Then they would lead you to sign up an account, or to download free VPN (virtual private network) and whatnot.

All the links to the free books which I share in this blog are authentic.

These free e-books really exist in a third-party websites, unless they have being removed for copyright infringement.

The Quarter Naguib Mahfouz free download

Anyway, let’s find out more about The Quarter by Naguib Mahfouz translated by Roger Allen and published by Saqi Books (London) back in 2019.

the quarter Naguib Mahfouz free book

The collection of 18 Naguib Mahfouz short stories in this book are:

The Oven
Your Lot in Life
Pursuit
Son of the Quarter
Nabqa in the Old Fort
The Scream
Namla’s Prophesy
Bad Luck
Shaikhun
The Arrow
The Whisper of the Stars
Our Father Igwa
The Storm
The End of Boss Saqr
Life is a Game
Late Night Secret
The Prayer of Sheikh

In 2018, Egyptian cultural critic, writer and journalist Mohamed Shoair unearthed these unpublished stories with the help of Mahfouz’s daughter Umm Kulthum.

These short stories or rather vignettes were found among novel drafts and outlines, notebooks with political observations, contracts, and a collection of forty stories in a drawer.

They were found at the home of Naquib Mahfouz.

The Quarter Naguib Mahfouz Free Download

This 87-page is filled with fascinating happenings in Cairo’s bustling Gamaliya quarter or ‘hara‘ (Tunisian Arabic dialect).

Among the stories, there are cautionary tales about justice, religion, hierarchy, honesty, and gender inequality.

You can say each story in The Quarter is like a parable with a central theme and comes with a pithy aphorism.

Some of them will leave you with an answered question, a paradox or a mystery that doesn’t yield easily to reason or logic.

The stories are no more than seven pages long, and the shortest one being only two pages (‘Shaikhun’).

Two regular characters found in all the narratives are the shaykh al-hara, the head of the quarter, and the imam, the religious figure.

They are there to tie things up.

As like other Mahfouz’s stories, the characters in The Quarter are common folks: baker, beggar, merchant, doctor and police chief.

You also find his 1988 Nobel peace prize acceptance speech at the end of this book.

Interestingly, I find the foreword by Turkish-British novelist Elif Safak insightful and heartwarming.

To get the freely available book online, click below.

The Quarter By Naguib Mahfouz
Click on any of these: Link 1, Link 2 (select PDF)


Related: Here is a big list of free books by Naguib Mahfouz in English and also films based on his work.


Disclaimer: I do not publish or host the book on this site. They are copyrighted to their respective owners.