Wolves of the Crescent Moon

Banned in Saudi Arabia, this provocative, fast-paced debut novel confirms what The Washington Post reported about its award-winning author: "Yousef Al- Mohaimeed is taking on some of the most divisive subjects in the Arab world . . . in a lush style that evokes Gabriel García Márquez." In a Riyadh bus station, a man comes across a file containing official reports about an abandoned baby. As he pieces together the shattered life documented within, a larger picture emerges of three outsiders-a Bedouin, an orphan, and a eunuch-linked by fate and trying to make lives for themselves in a predatory city. Unfolding with the intensity of a fever dream over the course of one night, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a novel of astonishing power and great moral consequence about a deeply traditional society confronting the modern world.

As their paths converge, three very different men--a Bedouin missing an ear, a one-eyed orphan, and a eunuch--reveal the miraculous power of stories to free them from the nightmare and pain of their lives to discover a new beauty, in the first novel published by an up-and-coming Middle Eastern writer to be published outside the Middle East. Original.