First published 2014
Howard Ingham sits at a Tunisian beach resort, checking for letters that never come. The film director he came to meet has vanished. His lover back in New York has gone silent. The script he should be writing sits untouched. Instead, Howard begins a novel about a man who lives two lives without moral boundaries. He drinks with a fellow American who talks too much about the Soviet Union and befriends a Danish man whose hatred of Arabs runs deep. The air grows thick with tension and the threat of violence lurks everywhere. When devastating news finally reaches him from home, Howard decides to stay in Tunisia and keep writing. The tremors of an unstable world press in around him, but he has found something in the moral ambiguity of his exile that pulls him deeper into both his fiction and a reality where right and wrong blur together.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Tunisia, New York
Period: 20th-century
292 pages · Kindle Edition · Virago