As a young man growing up under communism in South Yemen, Imran finds himself drawn to Hawiya, the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Marxist party. He departs Aden, the seaport city of his childhood, to study literature in Paris. Years later he returns to Yemen and meets Hawiya again—only to find that she is now a niqab-wearing Salafist, calling on people to join the conservative Islamist movement.Set against the backdrop of Yemeni history, Habib Abdelrab Sarori’s Arabic Booker long-listed novel traces one man’s lifelong search for love and his own political ideology.