Cairo Circles

by Doma Mahmoud

Overview

One of BuzzFeed's New Books You'll Love
“Cairo Circles is a novel that proves literature needn’t choose between pleasure and substance. You will tear through the pages of this delicious book, and you will be changed in the process. Doma Mahmoud is a tremendous writer.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
Sherif “Sheero” Abdallah is an NYU student reveling in independence, free from the judgmental gaze of his conservative family in Egypt to indulge in all sorts of pleasures. When the FBI comes knocking on his door, he’s convinced it’s a case of mistaken identity—until they show him a picture of his cousin Amir. Amir has perpetrated a horrific attack and Sheero is suddenly forced to return to Cairo and confront the events that led to their wildly different circumstances.
While Amir wore Sheero’s hand-me-downs and suffered at the hands of neglectful, abusive parents, Sheero attended Cairo’s most prestigious high school, where he and his best friend Taymour, the son of one of Cairo’s business moguls, could enjoy sports clubs, beach vacations, high-end dining, and socializing with girls from the French and British schools. Once inseparable cousins, Sheero and Amir grew further apart, Amir ultimately having more in common with the children of Taymour’s housekeeper: Omar, Mustafa, and Zeina.
In Cairo Circles, the lives of this unforgettable group of six young Egyptians intertwine dramatically over the course of over a decade, revealing complex relationships dominated by faith, tradition, social class, and the boundaries of personal freedom. An epic, multi-perspective page-turner, Doma Mahmoud's debut introduces readers to a bold and inventive new voice in fiction as Cairo's streets burst to life on the page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951213671
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Doma Mahmoud has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. He currently teaches at the American University of Cairo and is based in Cairo, Egypt. Cairo Circles is his first book.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Cairo Circles is a deft meditation on how family and class can brighten and distort life's trajectory and force us to grapple with how closely origin and desire are intertwined." —Raven Leilani, author of Luster

"An intricate, moving tale of interlocking lives that winds its way through the diverse traditions and social classes of contemporary Egypt... Cairo Circles' greatest strength is the way it explores the full meaning of the word 'family': of loyalty, betrayal, inescapable traditions and friendships stronger than blood." —Anjali Sachdeva, author of All the Names They Used for God

“Doma Mahmoud masterfully weaves together four Cairo families, separated by social class, whose lives intersect over decades in scenes that are among the most memorable and moving I’ve ever read. It is a rare relief to see their lives (ones not often written about) handled with such sharp and delicate nuance. A stunning novel about the difficulty of forgiving our kin, and ultimately, ourselves for our part, real or imagined, in shaping their choices. Mahmoud writes with such insistent and fierce compassion that it is impossible to read Cairo Circles without marveling at the opening and cleansing of one’s own heart.” —Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of A Place for Us

Editorial Reviews

08/16/2021

Mahmoud’s uneven debut explores the discrepancies of class and wealth in modern Cairo and the Egyptian diaspora through multiple strands of plot that jump back and forth in time and merge only tangentially. In mid-2000s New York City, wealthy Sheero, an undergraduate at NYU, is gleefully breaking every Muslim law in the book, doing lines of cocaine daily and living with his girlfriend, Carmen, a non-Muslim. Then his cousin Amir sets off a suicide bombing in the city’s subway, killing several other people and leading the FBI to question Sheero. Mahmoud then shifts to Cairo several years earlier for a story involving Sheero’s friend Taymour, whose housemaid’s 11-year-old daughter, Zeina, vanishes, possibly kidnapped. As Zeina’s younger twin brothers, Omar and Mustafa, grow up, their lives diverge, with Omar becoming a drug dealer and later a chauffeur for Taymour, and nerdy, depressed Mustafa studying mechanical engineering. Mahmoud explores the complexities of life in contemporary Cairo through the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. Individually, his characters are well developed, and his grasp of recent history is firm and illuminating. But almost every dramatic situation fizzles out, as the action becomes decreasingly credible and the narrative connections increasingly strained. It’s an ambitious effort with many striking details of life, but it’s undermined by its convoluted structure. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"[An] Enthralling debut... Mahmoud explores the intricacies of Cairo’s social dynamics and how powerful family relations, societal judgment, and class can be despite physical and socioeconomic distance. His dynamic storytelling will keep readers engaged throughout." —Booklist

"Mahmoud explores the complexities of life in contemporary Cairo through the aftermath of the 2011 revolution... his characters are well developed, and his grasp of recent history is firm and illuminating." —Publishers Weekly

"Interconnected Egyptian families wrestle with how status and religion influence their lives in this stunning debut. As the sons of their twin mothers, Amir and Sheero have a close, if complicated, cousin relationship. In a parallel story, Omar and Mustafa are twin brothers who couldn’t be more different. This novel explores the cultural fabric of Cairo alongside the deep influences of economic class and what people will do to both change and maintain their positions. Cairo Circles is both beautifully textured and emotionally charged." —BuzzFeed 

"When this book hits its stride, it does so with great power. This novel’s complex web of relationships makes for an ambitious literary debut." —Kirkus Reviews 

From the Publisher

2021-09-29
Mahmoud’s debut novel explores family bonds and class tension in Egypt and the United States.

Spanning several decades in the lives of its characters, this novel puts a group of young Egyptians and Egyptian Americans through a host of familial, moral, and psychological challenges. Mahmoud takes his time in establishing the full scope of the story, but it gradually becomes clear that it's exploring the wake of two traumatic experiences. The book opens in 2002 with Zeina, a girl from a working-class background who has a fantastic singing voice. She dreams of growing up to be a professional singer, which puts her at odds with her family. Some time later, she vanishes. Meanwhile, Sheero, who lives in New York and narrates several of the chapters, discovers that his estranged cousin, Amir, has carried out a mass shooting in New York City. As Sheero looks back over his fraught relationship with Amir and loses himself in whiskey and cocaine, Zeina’s brothers, Omar and Mustafa, struggle to find places for themselves in Egypt, a country going through substantial political changes. Sheero’s best friend, Taymour—whose family employed Zeina’s mother as a maid—brings the two plotlines together. There’s a lot to admire here, from the way Mahmoud moves the action forward and backward in time and parcels out information about the different characters. But the novel can be frustrating in places—watching Sheero wrestle with both his memories and an onslaught of media attention in the aftermath of Amir’s violent act makes for compelling reading, but a large chunk of his inner conflict is resolved in passing late in the novel. It doesn’t always click seamlessly, but when this book hits its stride, it does so with great power.

This novel’s complex web of relationships makes for an ambitious literary debut.

Kirkus Reviews