In her debut novel, The Queue, Egyptian journalist, or psychiatrist and visual artist Basma Abdel Aziz tells the story of an unnamed country where citizens must receive permission from a government authority known as "the Gate" in order to total basic tasks. Citizens endlessly wait in a line outside the Gate for a response. A review on Qantara describes The Queue as a mix of "George Orwell′s 1984 ... with the wealthy,detailed portrait of Cairo in Naguib Mahfouz′s Trilogy."
Source: wnyc.org