The Crocodiles

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square. One man looks back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amidst a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex and clumsy but determined intellectual bravado and retranslations of the Beat poets. Rakha''s masterly novel of growth and change which begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully captures 30 years in a living, daring and burning Cairo.