Buried

From the acclaimed author of River Town, an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive change

Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring began, and now the country was in chaos.

In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna: "the Buried." He and his wife struck up friendships with their Arabic instructor, a cynical political sophisticate; Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture; and the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met several Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade whose view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to Western conventional wisdom.

Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient, but not distant, past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a luminous book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity, a worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.