<p><i>Palace of Desire </i>is the second novel in Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent Cairo Trilogy, an epic family saga of colonial Egypt that is considered his masterwork.<br><br>The novels of the Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. In <i>Palace of Desire</i>, his rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. <br> <br>Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny.</p>