Metro: A Story of Cairo
ISBN10: 0805094881
ISBN13: 9780805094886
Trade Paperback
112 Pages
$26.00
CA$35.25
When Shehab, a young software designer, runs afoul of a loan shark, all avenues of escape in Mubarak's corrupt, chaotic Egypt seem to be closed to him. Getting help from the bank is impossible without connections, and Shehab's uncle abroad wants nothing to do with his troubles. A powerful businessman offers assistance, but the next day Shehab sees him being stabbed in an alley—and the man's dying words suggest a conspiracy extending to the upper reaches of the regime.
Angry and broke, Shehab enlists his friend Mustafa in a bank heist—and falls into a vortex of financial and political corruption. On the run with a case full of money and evidence of murder, the two careen through Cairo's metro system, evading the police and the thugs who are out in force to crush antigovernment protests. The only allies who can help get them out of this mess, the friends realize, are a blind shoe-shine man and a muckraking journalist.
In art as pulsing and immediate as Cairo itself, Magdy El Shafee has delivered a prescient portrait of a crumbling society and Egypt's coming eruption. A powerful story of young men with nothing left to lose, Metro sounds the cry for a better, freer future.
Reviews
Praise for Metro: A Story of Cairo
"There are twists and turns, murders and shadowy conspiracies . . . The Byzantine plot is saturated with a political commentary on the state of today's Egypt, depicted as a deeply dysfunctional country whose citizens take government corruption and repression as a given."—The National (Abu Dhabi)
"A visual record of the zeitgeist, filled with poverty, sexual frustration, corruption, and abuse . . . Part thriller, part love story, part socio-political commentary."—Daily News Egypt
"Young software genius Shebab longs to escape the social constraints of modern Cairo while also trying to avoid an irate a loan shark. A way out comes when a local businessman offers him work, but that hope is snuffed when Shebab and his friend Mustafa witness the man's murder. The man's cryptic dying words set the two friends on a trail of political corruption and intrigue, while they also commit a bank robbery in a desperate effort to fund a reboot of their directionless lives. El Shafee strives for an insightful look at modern metropolitan Egypt . . ."—Publishers Weekly