Metro - by Magdy El Shafee & El Shafee & Majdai Shaafiai (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Depicting the financial and social insecurity afflicting young people in modern Cairo, Metro was the first adult graphic novel published (and subsequently banned) in Egypt, just three years before the Arab Spring.

In art as pulsing and immediate as Cairo itself, Magdy El Shafee delivers a prescient portrait of a crumbling society and Egypt's coming eruption. A powerful story of young men with nothing left to lose, Metro sounds the cry for a better, freer future.

When Shehab, a young software designer, runs afoul of a loan shark, all avenues of escape in Mubarak's corrupt, chaotic Egypt seem to be closed to him. Getting help from the bank is impossible without connections, and Shehab's uncle abroad wants nothing to do with his troubles. A powerful businessman offers assistance, but the next day Shehab sees him being stabbed in an alley--and the man's dying words suggest a conspiracy extending to the upper reaches of the regime.

Angry and broke, Shehab enlists his friend Mustafa in a bank heist--and falls into a vortex of financial and political corruption. On the run with a case full of money and evidence of murder, the two careen through Cairo's metro system, evading the police and the thugs who are out in force to crush antigovernment protests. The only allies who can help get them out of this mess, the friends realize, are a blind shoe-shine man and a muckraking journalist.

Review Quotes

"For proof of the power of comics, look no further than Metro... It is not hard to see why the dictatorship was alarmed by the novel. In a deft black-and-white portrait of Cairo and its neighborhoods, a thriller unfolds along the metro system, giving a powerful insight into why the revolution took place." --Newsweek

"There are twists and turns, murders and shadowy conspiracies... The Byzantine plot is saturated with a political commentary on the state of today's Egypt, depicted as a deeply dysfunctional country whose citizens take government corruption and repression as a given." --The National (Abu Dhabi)

"A visual record of the zeitgeist, filled with poverty, sexual frustration, corruption, and abuse... Part thriller, part love story, part socio-political commentary." --Daily News Egypt

About the Author

Born in Libya in 1961, Magdy El Shafee is an Egyptian cartoonist, writer, and illustrator who has also worked in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2006, UNESCO honored El Shafee's comics series "Yasmin and Amina," written with writer Wa'el Saad and published in the weekly Alaa Eddin, for its depiction of migration and racism. Metro, which addresses Egyptian corruption, poverty, and injustice, was banned on publication in 2008 for "offending public morals" and is unavailable in Arabic. It is El Shafee's first full-length book. He lives in Cairo, where he edits El Doshma, a comics journal for young adults, and is working on his next graphic novel.