In the aftermath of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Isa al-Dabbagh watches the political order that formed him disappear almost overnight.

First published in Arabic in 1962 as Al-Summān wa-al-Kharīf, Autumn Quail is a compact novel about political transition as a private catastrophe. Isa drifts through resentment, nostalgia, sexual failure and increasingly desperate attempts to recover a vanished version of himself. The title’s migratory bird becomes an image of lives scattered by a seasonal change they cannot negotiate.

Once a well-placed civil servant and loyal member of the old ruling party, he is removed from office, investigated for corruption and left without the status through which he understood himself. We follow a man whose entire interior architecture has been built from access, prestige and proximity to power.

First Anchor Books edition, 1990. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and edges; clean and sound.