Set on the eve of the January 1977 “bread riots” against IMF austerity programs and privatization that nearly brought down President Anwar Sadat, The Heron catches Egypt in the mid-stream of its modern history, as seen through the prism of a long winter night in the Cairo neighborhood of Kit Kat. Since it first appeared in 1984, Ibrahim Aslan’s The Heron has been a classic of modern Arabic literature and was the basis of the film Kit Kat.