Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Plt;bPgt;AkhenatenPlt;/bPgt;, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt;In this beguilingP#160; novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985,P#160;Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the Pquot;heretic pharaoh,Pquot; or Pquot;sun king,Pquot;--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities.P#160;P#160;Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaohP#39;s contemporaries after his horrible death--including AkhenatenP#39;s closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at AkhenatenP#39;s court.P#160;As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, Pquot;the truthPquot; becomes increasingly evanescent.P#160;P#160;Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal.P#160;P#160;An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Plt;bPgt;AkhenatenPlt;/bPgt; is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.