Maktoub 'Ala El-Gibeen (Destiny Is Inevitable) by Dr. Galal Amin, Al-Karma Publishing, Cairo, 2015. pp.286

Dr Galal Amin's latest book sees him conclude that any octogenarian has encountered enough people, feeling affection, comfort and revulsion variously, to recognise that people's contradictions make them human riddles. Perhaps this work is his attempt to decipher those riddles.

Dr Amin has been a prominent economist since the sixties and has worked in research institutes in Egypt and abroad, as well as teaching at a number of Egyptian and foreign universities. He has published more than 60 books on economics. His most famous might be What Happened to the Egyptians? (1998), Describing Egypt at the End of the Twentieth Century (2011) and What Happened to the Egyptian Revolution? (2012).

Dr. Amin also has a more literary body of work, including Egyptian Genius Personalities (2003) and What Life Has Taught Me (2007). His latest book belongs to this category.

Amin introduces the book thus: "In this book I have tried to gather examples of human riddles and my interpretation of some of them. I think it beneficial for the reader to add them to what he has experienced of life's riddles".

The book, then, is a kind of autobiography, but it is perhaps unique among Arabic language autobiographies. It is not confined only to personalities but documents, events, personal incidents, cities, worlds and even films and theatre performances.

The work has six sections, each housing a collection of portraits and compact scenes. In each section a thread loosely connects the parts.

The first section, Two Respectable Families, features six family portraits. Some are light and humorous like The Hidden Gem and the Famous Writer, about his mother and father.

His father was the well-known writer Ahmed Amin, an intellectual pillar of 1930s Egypt, while his mother, like most Egyptian women of the period, was illiterate. Amin beautifully renders their personalities and relationships in uniquely sensitive prose.

Other portraits are doleful. Amin's brother Abdal-Hamid was endowed with a rare morality and a brilliant scientist's brain. He picked up PhDs in electrical engineering from England and Germany. But Abdal-Hamid's career and his life were crippled when, aged forty, he became convinced he was being observed and eavesdropped on by sinister agencies. He stopped leaving the house altogether, and was tragically paranoid until his death aged eighty. Amin conveys profound sorrow while tenderly guiding the reader through Abdal-Hamid's life.

Still in the first section, a successfully comic portrait of his late sister features an unforgettable scene where, having painstakingly assembled the whole family for a banquet, "everybody sat to eat, but after a couple of dishes she leapt up and announced the event was over and demanded everyone leave the house!".

Next he writes about his brother Hussein Amin, the ambassador who authored a number of intellectual works in the sixties and seventies before sliding into depression and ill health and losing the desire to write, read or do anything else. Dr Amin's is hyper-sensitive as he tackles the dilemmas thrown up by the tormented souls of his siblings. He expresses their agonies unflinchingly, and yet with obvious compassion.

He goes on to describe Hamama, the family servant whose life ended with a mysterious crime. Dr Amin concentrates on his personality and the role he played in his family's life as a crafty surgeon. The last portrait in the familial first section is a twine of vignettes of his English wife's family. Amin presents his in-laws replete with contradictions, issues, successes and failures.

It is not only humans that fill the book, but locations and formative incidents too, coming together to make for a deeply satisfying read.