Description
Book SynopsisFrom the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes
Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the heretic pharaoh, or sun king,--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, the truth becomes increas
