Yet every year, new brick houses, some quite substantial, emerge among the hovels.

First things first it is a very funny and perceptive book about the characters occupying a fashionable Cairo apartment block (which really exists) and squatting in hovels on its roof. Like the crumbling Majestic hotel in J. G. Farrell s novel Troubles, about the end of British rule in southern Ireland, the eponymous apartment block was a metaphor for the state, and its inhabitants are figures representative of different aspects of Mubarak s Egypt.