Written after the work that secured Naguib Mahfouz the Nobel Prize, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is one of his strangest and most elegant novels. 

Drawing inspiration from the great medieval traveller Ibn Battuta, Mahfouz sends his protagonist on a lifelong pilgrimage through a succession of imagined lands, each embodying a different social order, moral code and vision of civilisation.

Leaving his homeland in search of justice, wisdom and truth, Ibn Fattouma journeys through kingdoms shaped by tradition, militarism, equality, religious devotion and utopian ambition. Each destination promises a better world than the last, yet each reveals its own contradictions and failures. What begins as an adventure gradually becomes an inquiry into the impossible question that haunts political and spiritual life alike: can a perfect society exist, and if it can, what must be sacrificed to create it?

Unlike the sprawling realism of the Cairo Trilogy, this is Mahfouz working in a leaner, almost mythical register. The novel feels timeless and contemporary at once, unfolding like a philosophical travelogue whose concerns—faith, authority, freedom, justice and the search for meaning—remain stubbornly unresolved. It is a remarkably accessible entry point into Mahfouz's work while also being one of his most rewarding.

Translated by the great Denys Johnson-Davies, whose translations introduced generations of English-language readers to modern Arabic literature.

First Anchor Books edition, 1993. Good condition with light shelf wear, clean pages and a sound binding.