The Law of Inheritance

This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, & the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isolation: through his experiences & memories Yasser Abdellatif also unfolds the experiences of his Nubian family through the epochal changes the country underwent in the twentieth-century.

The symphonic four-part text presents us with narratives of Egyptian identity, a constant knitting & unravelling that moves us back & forth through time, as the reader slides & leaps across the shifting tectonic plates of Abdellatif's vignettes, his immaculately limpid prose poetry bringing forth the same questions. Nobody quite belongs in Cairo, it seems, but at the same time none of them belongs anywhere else: a relative emigrates from his Nubian village to the Cairo of the 1930s, where Italian fascists chase him through the streets & into a Maltese exile, only for him to return & make his way back South to the homeland he left. Another relative falls into religious esotericism and later madness, spinning away from Cairo & back to the wasteland of a village relocated after it had been flooded by the Aswan Dam. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, students fight security forces & binge on pills amid the dysfunctional remnants of a centralized state whose gravitational pull uprooted their parents & offered the possibility of assimilation into a national identity.

Through the clear sky of Abdellatif's novel his characters, the spaces they call home, their way-stations, & even the nation that contains them all are a murmuration of starlings, held together & apart forever.