The City Always Wins

By Omar Robert Hamilton Faber & Faber, £14..99

Journalist and filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel The

City Always Wins follows a group of friends, colleagues and protesters on the front line of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. Focusing on young couple Mariam and Khalil, it takes the reader into the heart of the action as the activists dodge bullets while throwing stones at the authorities. Hamilton, founder of the Mosireen Collective in Cairo, a non-profit media collective charting events during and after the Arab Spring, shows the impact of new media on the movement as the characters produce the Chaoscairo podcast and website carrying “news, tactics and triumphs” from the “unstoppable” revolution. Khalil progresses from having his “back straighten with virile pride” when he gets a complimentary Facebook message hailing his bravery on a Chaos post to realising as the political landscape shifts beyond recognition “we were prime time once, we had so many friends once”. There is no ignoring of the grim realities in this profoundly moving work, which opens in a morgue, and is ultimately an elegy, not just for the loss of revolutionary hopes, but also youth and young love.

Omar Robert Hamilton is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 18 August