Three volumes (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) spanning three generations of a Cairo family from WWI to WWII. Mahfouz proved that Arabic literature could sustain the full weight of the 19th-century European realist tradition while being entirely its own thing. He became the first Arabic-language Nobel laureate in 1988, largely on this work's strength.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.