In the New York Times, Suzanne Joinson writes:
At a time when the tensions that will produce World War I are simmering but have not yet exploded, Samuel, a Lebanese man who “speaks Arabic but looks like an Englishman,†is asked by an eccentric British colonial administrator to intervene in various tribal battles in the North African desert. During these escapades, he becomes embroiled in a scheme to transplant an entire palace, brick by brick, from Tripoli into the Sahara, in hopes of selling it (or pieces of it) to the region’s rich princes. Thus begins a Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream, occasionally turning nightmarish, but is always rendered with a hypnotic quality beautifully captured in Edward Gauvin’s elegant translation.
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