The Journey of the Unholy Family

From the sky, our house is a question mark. From the ground, it is the yawning mouth of a mythical serpent. We are born from its breath of rot and burnt garbage, where ghosts rise from the canal, and piety is a curse whispered under a sagging roof.Here, a mother finds god in a kilo of discarded meat. A father, a hero of a forgotten war, wages his battles against chewing tobacco and the volume on a secondhand TV. A boy named for a dead brother sketches his original's face in his mind, a substitute living an unfinished story. And Anas, the blessed, watches us all, his head living on its own while the rest of him is frozen at infancy.I became a child whose features were furrowed with the wrinkles of old men. A man trapped in a child's body.This is not a tale of a family. It is the story of the fly, the reed, the rust, the stench that rewrites your beliefs. It is the dream that is more real than the world. When the bulldozers come to devour the walls, you will ask with us: Had we ever truly occupied this land, only to have it liberated from our grasp?

Amr Al-Adly's The Journey of the Unholy Family is a lyrical and unflinching odyssey into the heart of a family clinging to existence at the margins of Cairo. It is a story where the sacred and the profane dance in the dust, and the ghosts of the past are as real as the grit underfoot. This is not a story you read, but a world you inhabit-a world that will haunt you long after the final page.