The novel begins with the disappearance of its protagonist, Walid Masoud, a Palestinian intellectual and political activist who has been living in Baghdad since the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He has left a tape he recorded while driving his car along a desert road to Syria, and five of his friends, try to find an explanation for his absence, each giving their point of view. They are members of Baghdad’s privileged class of intellectuals–doctors, lawyers and artists, and their conversations move back and forth between politics, art, love stories and everyday life. Through a series of monologues each one of them becomes a narrator in their own right because no one really knows who Walid Masoud was nor what really happened to him.

Approximate number of pages: 379 p.

Foreign rights: contact publisher