Birds of Amber

Meguid’s trilogy on the fabled city of Alexandria takes as its subject a community of railroad workers who inhabit low income neighborhoods along the city’s Mahmudiya Canal. The year is 1956, and against the backdrop of the Suez War, an unlikely band of brothers begin to make forays into the “Other Alexandria,” the cosmopolitan European city, now being abandoned by the Greeks, Italians and Jews, who are fleeing in droves.