The House of Certain Death is set in a crumbling mansion in Cairo’s old city, where an ensemble cast of melon sellers, stove repairmen, street cleaners, monkey trainers, and their wives all bicker and philosophize while waiting for the roof to fall on their heads; and there is indeed a suggestion of class conflict between the tenants and their landlord—a recurring villain in Cossery’s fiction—whose downfall seems to be promised at the novel’s apocalyptic close.