The man who lost his shadow

the long version

First published in English in 1966, this novel tells the story of Yusif Abdul Hamid, a young and ambitious Cairo journalist, through the eyes of four people in turn: Mabruka, the young peasant girl who marries Yusif's aging father while strongly attracted to Yusif; Samia, a minor actress, who Yusif lives with and almost marries but in the end rejects; Muhammad Nagi, the newspaper editor who then marries Samia and who is pushed out of his job by Yusif; and finally Yusif himself, editor-in-chief of the newspaper al-Ayyam, a stranger to himself, "someone I neither love nor hate."