📚 Aliens have taken over a minibus station. Egyptian writer and translator Mohamed El Fouly starts his debut novel, The Grand Night — published by Diwan and released at the 2025 Cairo International Book Fair — with an absurd, chaotic scene: a flying saucer suddenly lands in a bustling minibus station, throwing the neighborhood into a frenzied panic and altering the fate of the informal settlement.

El Fouly builds on a bold premise: What if first contact with extraterrestrials didn’t happen in the West, as most sci-fi stories imagine, but instead in a chaotic, densely populated informal settlement on the outskirts of a fictional city that closely resembles Cairo? And what if, instead of a global diplomatic response, the area was completely cut off from the world, forcing its inhabitants to deal with the situation alone?

The plot kicks off when the UFO lands in a place known as Ard El Mawqef, surrounding the area in a blue dome that isolates it from the rest of the city — no one can enter, leave, or communicate beyond the barrier. As panic spreads, the neighborhood kingpin, Al Ma’allem Khashaba Al Hattab, rallies his crew and devises a strategy to confront this unexpected invasion.

This sets the stage for a cast of eccentric characters: Alaa Box, Khashaba’s right hand man; his wife, Samah, who looks like a local version of Egyptian pop star Ruby (at least by local beauty standards); Hag Taher, known as the most corrupt man alive; Mr. Nasser El Tohami, the English teacher nicknamed “The Shakespeare of the Arabs”; and Mahmoud Kotla, a man whose muscles and fat blend into a strange physique. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that aliens aren’t the biggest threat looming over the area— ancient magic and long-buried secrets hold even darker dangers.

It’s the approach and language that makes the book worth reading. El Fouly writes casually in a mix of colloquial and formal Arabic, offering a multilayered narrative that hooks readers from the very first page. But the book is a cocktail of surrealism, realism filled with a lot of twists, dark humor, and unexpected revelations that constantly shift the course of events.

WHERE TO FIND IT- You can find the book at Diwan, Al Shorouk, Bibliothek, and Al Masriah.

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