Souhaib Ayoub

A detective novel involving serial killings of women in an apartment building in Tripoli, Lebanon. It opens with the journey of the bedouin woman, Shamsa al-Sabea, from her escape from al-Abda refugee camp in 1960 to her disappearance in 2010. Her story is narrated by her 11 year-old grandson, Hassan al-Sabea, who is mute and does not attend school. But there is another, anonymous narrator. He introduces us to the lives of the building’s inhabitants and their relatives, and to the basement that the new resident, Hargoul, has turned into a mystery. An acerbic black humor prevails as the narrator leads us into a world populated by characters with strange mental disorders or congenital deformities, a world one might think could only exist on another planet.