When Fatima Shihabi, an Iraqi poet and journalist, learns she is marked for death by Saddam Hussein’s secret police, she flees Iraq, evading Saddam’s helicopters hunting her in the desert, only to discover that no other country will grant her asylum.  Her flight from Saddam’s vengeance, and the extraordinary efforts of Charles Sherman, a Wall Street lawyer, to save her life, is the subject of this gripping novel, inspired by a true story.
 
How a resourceful Muslim woman and a determined American man, bound by their common humanity, love for each other, and fate, manage to thwart a notorious symbol of overarching evil and demented depravity and, in the bargain, achieve greater self-understanding and eventual redemption sends a powerful message to the post-9/11 world.  The novel stands as a testament to the importance of individual effort and perseverance in a world wracked by cataclysmic conflict and beset by profound cultural misunderstanding.  The story of Fatima and Charles points the way toward eventual reconciliation and synthesis between Islam and the West.

The novel is set in the fall of 2002, a few months before the American invasion of Iraq, in New York, Paris, the French Alps, Saudi Arabia and Baghdad.