The Crocodiles
  • Published: 15 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9781609805715
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

The Crocodiles

A Novel

Formats & editions
EBook
9 Dec 2014
Paperback
15 Nov 2014
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A ferocious and urgent novel of the Arab Spring that begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, covering sex, violence, metafiction, deception, lost youth, and the last thirty years of a living, breathing, daring, burning, culturally infested Cairo.

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.
  • Published: 15 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9781609805715
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for The Crocodiles

"What happened in Egypt around its second revolution was a mixture of grandeur and pettiness, of sorrow and mirth, of expectation and despair, of theory and flesh. All of which may be found in The Crocodiles, a novel where reality sheds its veil to reveal its true face--that of a timeless mythology." -Amin Maalouf, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Samarkand