“When I walked into the Grand Egyptian Museum for the first time, I wasn’t prepared for what I felt. I saw Egypt’s future, not its past. A civilizational project that places Egypt at the center of the world, not as a relic but as a living force. I wrote A Pyramid Builder years before that moment. But standing inside those walls, I understood for the first time that the story had been waiting for exactly this.” — Hani Selim

About the Book

Mohamed is an Egyptian-American Egyptologist who has spent his life between two worlds — the country of his roots and the country of his making. When he returns to Cairo to study a set of recently discovered artifacts, he expects to find answers. What he finds instead challenges everything he thought he knew about history, identity, and what it means to truly belong somewhere.

A Pyramid Builder is a novel about homecoming. About the weight of civilization and the lightness of a single human life measured against it. About what happens when the past refuses to stay buried and the future demands to be seen.

Set against the backdrop of Cairo, a city that holds thousands of years of human story within its walls, this is Hani Selim at his most ambitious: a writer who has lived between cultures, returned to his roots, and found that the distance gave him exactly the eyes he needed to see clearly.

A Novel for This Moment

A Pyramid Builder returns this April in a rebranded edition, releasing in alignment with the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, one of the most significant cultural landmarks of our time. A novel about an Egyptologist finding his way home, arriving at the precise moment Egypt is introducing itself to the world again.

Some stories find their moment. This one has found its.