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Short Breaks in Egypt: Three and Four Day Cairo Trips
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Top 10 · Food and culture
The ten books about Egypt we suggest are four Egyptian novels, two classics by visitors, three histories and one novel of Alexandria. Start with Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk and Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building. Add Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love and Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero. Then Agatha Christie, Amelia Edwards, Toby Wilkinson, Max Rodenbeck, Howard Carter and Lawrence Durrell. Each entry gives the author, the year and why it helps on a trip.
We wanted books that make a trip to Egypt richer. Some explain the past, some show modern Egypt from the inside, and some are simply good company on a Nile boat.
Four are by Egyptian writers, because Egypt's own voices are often missing from reading lists. Every author, title and year is checked against publisher or library records.
There is no ranking. We start with Egyptian novels, then travel classics, then history.
Palace Walk is the first book of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. It follows one family in the old city around the time of the First World War. The English translation came out in 1990.
Mahfouz was born in Old Cairo in 1911. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Arab writer to do so. The family house is in the Gamaliya district of medieval Cairo. Read it before you walk those streets.
This novel follows the people who live in one apartment block in Downtown Cairo. Through them it shows money, power, faith and love in modern Egypt. It came out in English in 2004.
It was the best-selling Arabic novel of 2002 and 2003, and has been translated into 23 languages. The real building stands at 34 Talaat Harb Street.
Soueif is an Egyptian writer who writes in English. Her novel links an English widow who goes to Egypt around 1900 with her American great-granddaughter, who finds her papers in the 1990s.
It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. It is a good read for anyone curious about Egypt under British rule.
El Saadawi was a doctor, psychiatrist and feminist writer. This novel grew out of her meeting with a woman in Qanatir Prison, waiting to be executed.
It was written in 1975 and published in Arabic in 1977. It is short and serious.
Hercule Poirot is on holiday in Aswan and boards a Nile steamer heading south. One of the passengers is murdered. The trip includes a stop at Abu Simbel.
It first came out in November 1937. It is the easiest book on this list and the most fun to read on a Nile cruise.
Edwards was a novelist who sailed up the Nile in the winter of 1873 to 1874. This is her account of the trip, illustrated with her own drawings.
The journey changed her life. In 1882 she co-founded the Egypt Exploration Fund to study and protect ancient sites. Read it before a dahabiya cruise, which still sails the same way.
Wilkinson is a Cambridge Egyptologist. This book tells the history of ancient Egypt from about 3000 BC to Cleopatra in one volume.
It won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history in 2011. If you read one history book before your trip, make it this one.
Rodenbeck grew up partly in Cairo and later ran The Economist's office there. His book is a history of the city, told through its people and places.
It is often called one of the best single books on Cairo. It explains why the city looks the way it does, from the Citadel to the Downtown streets.
Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922. This first volume, written with his colleague Arthur Mace, tells how the tomb was found and opened.
It is the story told by the man who was there. Read it before you see the tomb at Luxor, and the treasures at the Grand Egyptian Museum.
Justine is the first of Durrell's four novels known as The Alexandria Quartet. It is set among the mixed communities of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s.
The writing is rich and dreamy. Read it if you plan a day or two in Alexandria and want a feel for its past.
For history, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson. For modern life, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. For a Nile cruise, Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.
Naguib Mahfouz. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the only Arab writer to do so. His Cairo Trilogy, starting with Palace Walk, is the place to begin.
Death on the Nile, from 1937, is set on a Nile steamer from Aswan. Christie also set a mystery in ancient Egypt, Death Comes as the End.
Death on the Nile is the fun choice. A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Amelia Edwards is the classic account of sailing the river in the 1870s. Both suit a slow day on deck.
Yes. Michael Ondaatje's novel came out in 1992, and the film followed in 1996. Part of it is set in Cairo and the Western Desert before the war.
Yes. Every book on this list has an English edition. The Egyptian novels are translations, apart from The Map of Love, which Soueif wrote in English.
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Written and checked by the Nile Trip Guide editorial team · Last reviewed . Entry rules, prices and opening hours change — check anything critical against the official sources linked on this page.
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8 days · Classic Egypt
The route most people take first, at the length it was built for: Giza and the Grand Egyptian Museum, then a flight to Luxor and four nights sailing down to Aswan.
from US$2,135 / per person
8 days · Nile & Red Sea
No boat on this one. Giza and the Grand Egyptian Museum, a night in Luxor for both banks, two nights on the Red Sea, then back to Cairo for the Citadel, Coptic Cairo and the Royal Mummies.
from US$2,040 / per person
10 days · Classic Egypt
Five nights in Cairo either side of a four-night sail from Luxor to Aswan. The Cairo days are private, just your party and a guide; the sightseeing off the boat is shared with a small group.
from US$2,635 / per person
