Yasin, the eldest son, is al-Sayyid Ahmad's only child by his first marriage, to a woman whose subsequent marital affairs are the source of acute embarrassment to father and son. The family house, in Cairo's Gamaliya district, is in the exact location of the Beshtak Palace. His insistence on his household authority forbids his wife and children from questioning why he stays out late at night or comes home intoxicated.
In particular, these include music, drinking wine and conducting numerous extramarital affairs with women he meets at his grocery store, or with courtesans who entertain parties of men at their houses with music and dancing. al-Sayyid Ahmad permits himself conventionally forbidden pleasures. He sets strict rules of Muslim piety and sobriety in the household. The novel follows al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad as the head of his household Amina, his sons, Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal, and his daughters, Khadija and Aisha. The novel is written in a social realist style and reflects the social and political setting of Egypt in during 1917 to 1919. It begins in 1917, during World War I, and ends in 1919, the year of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.
The setting of the novel is Cairo around the time period of World War I. The book's Arabic title translates into 'between two palaces'. Hutchins and Olive Kenny, and then published by Doubleday (publisher) in 1990. Originally published in 1956 with the title Bayn al-qasrayn, the book was then translated into English by William M. Palace Walk ( Arabic: بين القصرين, romanized: Bayn al-Quṣrayn, lit.'Between Two Palaces') is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and the first installment of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy.
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