Issued in 1993 in Beirut, and winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Award for 1998

Critics considered it the most important work of fiction in the Arab world during the last ten years, and because of its successes raised around the storms, making it the most controversial novel.
For many years it has been the best-selling novel according to the Arab Book Fair statistics (Beirut, Amman, Syria, Tunisia, Sharjah).
A number of studies and dissertations have been published throughout the Arab world in the universities of Jordan, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Marseille and Bahrain.

The story revolves around a painter named Khalid ibn Tubal who lost his arm during the war. He falls in love with a beautiful girl called Hayat, the daughter of an Algerian fighter who was a friend of Khalid during the liberation revolution. But her father was killed during the Great Liberation War against French colonialism. (Khaled and Hayat), but in the end she faces the traditions of her society and will marry a large and influential figure in the Algerian government, this marriage and Other compelling circumstances in which Khaled would be going would cause a total breakdown of his life.