On an early autumn morning in 1988, on the outskirts of an unnamed Algerian city, a local shepherd stumbles across the dead body of Zakia Zaghouani, a beautiful nightclub singer who ran away from her hometown and family, seeking a brighter future. Incompetent and corrupt Inspector Hamid is perhaps the least likely to find the murderer. On their own, none of Khatibi’s characters can help us see and solve the crime. For that, we need a mosaic of many voices: Noura, the lawyer who represents Zakia’s fiance´; Ibrahim, who runs the VHS rental shop and whose mother is a cleaning lady at the hotel where Zakia worked; Kamal, the front-desk clerk at the hotel; Maimoun, the hotel’s owner; the Golden Sheikha, a rival singer; Zakia’s fiance´, Bashir; and more.

Most of them are searching not just for Zakia’s killer, but for the stories of other ghosts flitting through their city, the ghosts of abused and murdered women; the ghosts of fathers who died during the country’s war for independence; and the ghosts of Algeria’s long colonial period.

Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Young Authors, the most prestigious prize for fiction in Arabic.