Friendly Fire
By Alaa Al Aswany
Translated by Humphrey Davies
4th Estate, £10.99 240 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Alaa Al Aswany is a dentist. He drills, fills and pulls teeth at his Cairo surgery. But from a desk next to his dental chair, he also writes novels, stories and newspaper articles.

Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, a fictionalised commentary on Egyptian society and venality, is the Arab world’s best-selling novel of recent years. His follow-up, Chicago, was an acerbic tale of post-9/11 America. Yet Aswany’s third career, as an activist in the secular opposition to Egypt’s authoritarian government, has left him with a file of other works that no publisher in his home country would touch.

Some of these can be found in Friendly Fire, his new collection of stories. A few should have remained in the drawer, but largely the writing is crisp, assured and perceptive. Most impressive is “The Isam Abd el- Ati Papers”, Aswany’s novella about a young man whose fascination with the west – and disgust at the shallowness of his fellow Egyptians – leads him to alienation and eventual ruin. “I have grasped the truth,” he laments. “I have taken it in my hand and it has sentenced me to loneliness.”

Aswany’s characters often end up lonely and anguished. A man reacts violently to his wife’s infidelity, causing himself more pain than she did. A son whose father has died during the Ramadan season of fasting is distracted by thoughts of food, deepening his sense of filial guilt.

Friendly Fire does have moments of grace. Though it nearly kills him, a one-legged boy succeeds in riding a bicycle. A poor teacher finds the courage to turn down a job she desperately needs from an employer she despises.

Aswany’s ability to describe pain in so many varieties tempts one to use dental metaphors – words such as grind, extract, anaesthetise. But the now famous author has told interviewers that he continues his practice, in part, to keep in touch with ordinary people. As he looms over them with a drill, he clearly sees some interesting things.

Donald Morrison teaches writing at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His new book, ‘The Death of French Culture’, is published later this year by Polity Press