Metro

"Yes. This is the first graphic novel in Arabic. It’s almost uncannily prescient. Its hero is a young computer engineer who is gypped out of his rightful earnings by collusion between corrupt businessmen and foreign companies. He’s initially very against the activism that his girlfriend is involved in. His girlfriend goes on marches and takes part in demonstrations. But, by the end, the hero also feels himself pulled into it. He feels finally convinced of the need to do something. One thing people have said quite often about the recent demonstrations is that people seem to have lost their fear. And this is one of the things that Magdy wrote about in this book, in 2007. One of the characters says: ‘We’re all in a mousetrap, but no one realises that all we have to do is walk out.’ And elsewhere the hero says something along the lines of, ‘everybody is afraid and that’s what he would most like to see an end to’. Magdy deals with corruption, street demonstrations, frustrations of young people — not only of the bright middle class, but other characters too. There’s a blind shoeshine man, a young guy in the slums who wants to be a singer, who ends up being killed when he is hired by the police to be a thug to rough up and molest demonstrators… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, a very timely book. It was confiscated when it was published. It’s not available in Egypt. Its author was tried and found guilty of offending public morals. There is one frame in which a woman’s breasts appear. Of which there are a fair number in the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, but never mind. They needed an excuse because the real motives were political; that’s fairly obvious. At one point in the book, for example, the hero decides that he is going to rob a bank because he can’t think of any other way to get on in life. When he gets inside the bank, he finds a corrupt politician just about to walk off with a suitcase of cash in an unsecured loan —and the politician bears an unfortunately close resemblance to a known public figure… This almost guaranteed that it would be confiscated. It’s not yet published in English, but it has been translated. The author does have an agent, Will Lippincott , and we hope that it will find a publisher."