'Nakhjavani's robust debut is a Chaucerian rondo of linked tales, welded into a powerful, ominous whole' - THE TIMES'A remarkable first novel...The story expands like the overlapping petals of a flower...The language of Nakhjavani's story is as beautiful as the scenes she describes, a litany of names and places, beliefs and deities' - SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY_________________________A tantalising tale of what befalls nine different individuals travelling the desert route between Mecca and Medina in the middle of the nineteenth century, as they encounter a mysterious saddlebag that changes each of their lives. It seems a perfectly ordinary saddlebag when the Thief steals it from a Pilgrim; but what are its contents, so precious and so powerful that they can wreak death or joy, ruin or salvation?_________________________'Like CATCH 22 and THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, when you finish reading Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's debut novel, you wonder how on earth she is ever going to be able to follow it up, such is the uniqueness of its form, the precise simplicity of its language and the vaguely unsettling nature of its premise' - BIG ISSUE