The same happened when it was reissued in the Penguin New Writers Series in 1968.”[16] The novel was positively reviewed in both The Times[17] and The New York Times,[18] as well as in The Guardian,[19] the New Statesman,[20] The Times Literary Supplement,[21] and The New Yorker,[22] and elsewhere. In his contemporaneous review of the novel Martin Levin calls the book “a small masterpiece of a novel that does several things with astonishing virtuosity. It gives an Egyptian’s view of Nasser’s Egypt that brilliantly communicates the texture of this experience.