Khaled is a young man in his thirties who graduated from the College of Fine Arts. He failed to travel from his city of “fairies,” which was closing in on him from all sides, so he had no choice but to work as an employee in a bookstore, through which he practiced an additional, secret job in which he sold his works of fiction. Life would have gone better if one could keep the secret, but as Faraj, Khaled’s father, says: “No matter how much you hide it, the secret will wake up inside you one day, and then it will continue to burrow into your soul until it is released to the world.” Thus, Khaled’s choices in life soon put him in the face of “Khalil Nayef,” a lawyer with wide influence who wants to enter the world of writing.
Within a suspenseful context and a rapid pace, Tamim Heneidi dives into the scenes of the relationships between writers, publishers, and bookstore owners, and sheds light on the way in which culture may be used to polish the image of the political class created by the war. But can books perform a task like this?
