At the outset of this 279-page volume, the author declares it fiction—but as one reads the nearly ten interwoven stories about a particular delivery, it's hard to tell where fiction ends and reality begins.
Tarek Taha's Talabat: Hawdit El-Delivery (Orders – Delivery stories) (Kotobna, 2025) explores the world of Egypt's delivery services.
Each story's leading protagonist is a deliveryman, except for one story where it is a deliverywoman. An odd turn of events in every story allows Taha, or his protagonists, to meditate on life in Cairo in the 2020s.
The stories are essentially about an increasingly stratified society where money, though crucial for that division, is not the only factor.
In several places in Taha's book, the deliverymen are astounded by the enormous wealth some people have, compared to the lives of struggle and hardship that the deliverymen lead.
The book also narrates stories of older people who feel left behind with nothing but memories of bygone times. Other stories portray families who have become unconsciously disconnected, new ways of making money in Egypt, and money-related crimes.
Taha offers readers accounts of the lives of those deliverymen. Every deliveryman (otherwise known in vernacular Arabic as Tayar [pilot]) narrates the story in the first person. While the narrative begins with the deliveryman's own story, it ends with a narration of an odd experience the deliveryman encounters. One would arrive at a crime scene, and another would arrive to meet the love of his life.
Some deliverymen encounter an ill-mannered child who snatches the sandwich bags and starts eating before his mother asks for a change of order from beef to chicken burger. Another deliveryman is held by a woman who locks him in to force him to assemble the modular furniture that she ordered. A third encounters a man living in a mansion who beats up his wife for thrift after she has ordered four pizzas.
Taha's smooth and flowing prose makes each story read like a lengthy Facebook post reflecting on how life has become for the hopeful poor, the rich, and the filthy rich.
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