Showing Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz

This moving and perceptive story centres upon a group of disaffected middle-class Cairenes who gather on a house-boat on the River Nile every evening to smoke kif, drink, and discuss politics. Their host is an addict, so dependent that he is in danger of losing his job.

One evening they venture out for a drive which ends in tragedy, destroying their easy camaraderie and exposing the frailty of human relationships. In his elegant but economic prose, Mahfouz once again creates - out of the simplest of plots - a telling commentary on human nature.