Critical Praise

"A brief, despairing novel. . . . Khadra's prose is gentle and precise. . . . Makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when 'the light of his conscience has gone out.'"

——The New Yorker

"Riveting. . . . Spare, taut, and pristinely clear prose . . . . An uncanny knack for making moral tension palpable. . . . Extraordinarily moving."

——The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A surprisingly tender book. . . . Amid the terror a classic story about love sneaks through: love lost, love imagined, love morphed into madness."

——The New York Times Book Review

"A novel very much in the tradition of Albert Camus, not only in its humanism and concern with the consequences of individual choices but also in its determination to bear witness to the absurdities of daily life. . . . [A] chilling portrait of fundamentalism run amok and its fallout on ordinary people."

——The New York Times