Diary of a Country Prosecutor

Who shot Kamar al-Dawla Alwan? What does the beautiful peasant girl Rim have to do with it? And is mysterious Sheikh Asfur as mad as he seems?

1920s Cairo. A young and ambitious prosecutor is dispatched from the bustling city to a provincial village to investigate a serious crime. Armed with his European education, the prosecutor is confident that he will dispense justice in this rural outpost. But as he becomes engrossed in village life, he finds himself increasingly befuddled by an alien legal system and the clueless bureaucrats who enforce it. As he teases out the facts of the case, one thing becomes clear: justice is never as simple as it seems.

First published in 1937, Diary of a Country Prosecutor takes aim at a self-interested ruling class and the hapless public servants at their disposal. Both a comedy of errors and a trenchant social satire, this classic by one of the Arab world’s leading dramatists has lost none of its bite.

Ficção / Literatura Estrangeira / Romance