Alaa al Aswany has many of the virtues of good old-fashioned realist novelists. And they were all on display in his breakthrough book, The Yacoubian Building. The interconnected lives of the inhabitants of one Cairo apartment block gave al Aswany the opportunity to build up an ensemble portrait of modern Egypt. An attractive and humane book, The Yacoubian Building was true to the spirit of Eliot. The author's gift of imaginative sympathy allowed us to enter the lives of a cast of characters, from ageing rakes through to young Islamist radicals, with a proper measure of understanding and carefully calibrated empathy. The book, like the best realist fiction, also had a political message at its heart. The central villain of the work is the Egyptian political system - the backwardness, misery and violence which blight the characters' lives spring from the failure of a great nation to modernise and, crucially, to democratise.

The failure of Egypt's political leadership to provide a home that is anywhere near being human and attractive is also a central theme of Chicago. It charts the experience of exiles - both those who have left Egypt for the promise of America as well as those who are in internal exile from an America to which they no longer feel they can belong - and the horrors of what they are fleeing from are powerfully conveyed.

The sadistic nature of police repression in Egypt is captured in the character of the spook Safwat Shakir; the terrible mix of toady-ing and bullying that marks every ambitious apparatchik in a one-party state is brought to life in all its ugly glory in the character of Dr Ahmad Danana, and the vivid reality of Middle Eastern autocracy is caught in one particularly telling passage, which introduces in all his waxen glory the Egyptian state president.