★★★

Sulaiman Addonia must be one of the few authors whose life has been as dramatic as his fiction. Born in Eritrea, he spent his childhood in a refugee camp in Sudan and then moved as a teenager to Jeddah, where his mother had been working for some time as a servant. Later, he and his brother came to London; and, more recently still, he has moved to Brussels with his Belgian partner and their son. The protagonist of this debut novel shares some of Addonia’s own displaced history, although in other important ways he’s had a very different experience. Struggling to make ends meet as a foreign worker in Jeddah, Naser lives in a strange world where life is governed by the whims of his kafeel (Saudi sponsor) and the dictates of the religious police, and where men and women inhabit fiercely segregated worlds. Then, one hot and languid summer, a girl drops a note at Naser’s feet in the street. Shrouded in her burqa, she has fallen in love with him; but he can only recognise her by her shoes. It’s the beginning of a heartfelt story of forbidden love played out in the shadow of the fundamentalist regime.

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