Picking up where The Bridges of Constantine ended, Mosteghanemi's second novel begins in war-torn Algeria in the 1990s. Trapped in a loveless marriage to a high-ranking military man, a novelist decides to lose herself in her writing. But in an unexpected twist, what she writes begins to take on flesh. She falls in love with the story's male protagonist, and a love on paper becomes a forbidden love lived out in the dark corners of a battered city. After all, the best and truest loves are those we find when we're looking for something else. With poetic finesse, the author weaves fact and fiction to convey a chapter in Algeria's history as no one else could.