A darkly comic coming-of-age tale from 1990s Cairo, where survival, satire and storytelling collide.

When a seventeen-year-old flees his violent father and heads to Cairo to chase his dream of breaking into the arts, he ends up in a crumbling flat with a mercurial landlady and her volatile son. Set in the early 1990s, The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer is a sharply observed, darkly comic coming-of-age novel about ambition, survival, and the strange intimacies forged by necessity. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this cult-favourite debut by Egyptian screenwriter, journalist, and satirist Belal Fadl appears in English for the first time, in a vivid translation by Osama Hammad.