In 2016, five years after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government decided to alter public mentions of the 2011 revolution. It omitted names of activists from grade-school textbooks, and downplayed the mass protests in some high-school texts. “It’s like the revolution didn’t happen,” Kamal Mougheeth, a researcher at Egypt’s National Council for Education, told the Washington Post at the time. Last month, the Ministry of Education announced it would strike mentions of the uprisings in January, 2011, and June, 2013, from history textbooks for the upcoming academic term. It turned out that an exam question this past year had been too controversial: “How would things be if al-Sisi had never given the June 30th speech?”

This was the speech in which Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s current President, issued an ultimatum to the government, then led by President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood: meet “the demands of the people,” or the military would “announce a roadmap . . . for the future.” Three days later, the Army deposed Morsi. In the months that followed, Sisi’s regime killed roughly a thousand pro-Morsi protesters in a single day, banned the Muslim Brotherhood, detained journalists, and forcibly disappeared and jailed thousands of opponents. Today, the country of ninety million people that overthrew a dictator is struggling with crippling food prices and rising inflation. The exam question was controversial because it was implicitly asking another question: Has Egypt’s revolution failed?

A new novel, “The City Always Wins,” by Omar Robert Hamilton, intimates that this may be the wrong question to ask. The book is set late in 2011, and focusses on the intertwined lives of an activist, Mariam, and a journalist, Khalil. On a recent evening at the McNally Jackson bookstore, in New York, Hamilton, himself a journalist and filmmaker, insisted that one cannot define the bookends of the Egyptian revolution—that it is not a moment whose success or failure can be measured precisely. This, he suggested, is why he turned to fiction. News articles and analysis, and works of history, naturally focus on discrete events—the January 25th revolution; the Maspero massacre, in October; the protests of June, 2013—and regard them as markers of progress or failure. Fiction gives authors greater freedom to consider the inner lives of the people who are shaped by those events. By attending to these less visible consequences, Hamilton can address a different sort of question—not whether the revolution failed but whether it is reasonable to imagine that the revolution is, in some sense, still alive.

“The City Always Wins” opens in a hospital morgue in October, 2011, the month when the Egyptian military killed more than twenty peaceful demonstrators near Maspero, the government television building. That event was later described as the “single bloodiest day since the Revolution,” and yet the Army denied that it had used live bullets on civilians. At the morgue, Mariam, young, passionate, and exhausted, watches as a woman holds a dead man in her arms. The father of one of the dead insists that the deceased should be buried immediately, while others argue that they must wait for an autopsy report. It is a way to get justice, they point out.

The rest of the book follows Mariam and Khalil and their friends, who together create a media outfit to counter the state-controlled news. Hamilton co-founded the nonprofit media collective Mosireen, in Cairo, in 2011, and, also like Khalil, moved back to New York a few years after the revolution. At McNally Jackson, he insisted that the book is not autobiographical; nonetheless, he skillfully manipulates the push and pull between fact and fiction in the novel, punctuating the narrative with date stamps, real tweets, and newspaper headlines. Anyone familiar with Egypt’s recent history knows what’s coming; the suspense lies in one’s uncertainty about how the characters will respond.

It’s striking that Hamilton’s book doesn’t start with the events of January, 2011, and the unexpected triumph of the protesters. But that story, as one of Khalil’s friends, a filmmaker, says, is “ruined already by its over-telling.” Instead, those eighteen days in early 2011 loom like a spectre over the book’s characters; everything they do seems to issue a verdict on what happened then. The story of the revolution, Hamilton implies, is not of the rosy days early on but of everything that came after.

Part of the novel’s accounting of 2011 is simply a remembrance of those who died that January, and in the years that followed. But even here Hamilton resists sentimentality and romanticism. The mourning is interlaced with uncomfortable guilt: Khalil’s guilt for not being able to bear the burden of a father who lost his son; a mother’s guilt for promoting resistance when she knows that young men, like her son, will continue to die; a generation’s guilt over trying to change its country, wondering if those who died did so in vain. “So many dead, so many missing” is a remark repeated throughout the book.

Hamilton’s narrative serves, in part, as a challenge to the official record, which insists that the Army did not kill peaceful protesters and that Sisi protected the revolution. The book also challenges the myth that January, 2011, was beautiful and peaceful. In this way, too, it is a reminder of the suppression and violence that continue. These days, millions may not be descending on Tahrir Square, but protesters are still being killed, and activists are still being jailed. “There is no glamour to these long, painful afternoons. No one to watch the withering spectacle,” Khalil thinks at one point. At his talk, Hamilton was more direct: “I’ve tried to take optimism and hope out of the equation. You do something because you have no other choice.”

What propels the story forward is not the realization of a utopian system—it’s the people who feel this unshakeable need to do something, and the lived experience of that necessity. At the bookstore, Hamilton described the love story in the novel as incidental; it’s a literary device, he said, to help the reader along. But it’s a device that Hamilton deploys expertly, giving the events a shape that avoids tragedy. The love of Mariam, who continues to organize, and Khalil, who struggles to understand the point of doing so, unfolds as a metaphor for the revolution. The two meet in January, 2011, caught up in the adrenaline and excitement of those initial days; they struggle to sustain a relationship as they struggle to keep the revolution alive; and, ultimately, their romance ends. When it happens, there is no yelling, no stinging words or tears. They seem to know that such an ending was inevitable. And though they cease to be lovers they continue to fight together. Perhaps that is not hope, but it looks something like it.