The author retells the legend of the origin of the Tuaregs and of how evil came into the world, through greedy people at an oasis. The protagonist Anubis searches for his father, shape shifts, has encounters with several female jinni, which to me were temptresses. The star of the novel is the trackless desert over which he wanders. The language was absolutely gorgeous. The story exuded desert and I felt as though I were there. ( )

I don't know whether to describe this book as post-modern or pre-ancient. It is a modern retelling of an ancient Tuareg myth (the Tuareg are the aboriginal inhabitants of the deserts of southern Libya, and a group to which al-Koni belongs) about Anubi, a mythological figure from Tuareg folklore who identifies (more or less) with the Egyptian God Anubis. It is set entirely in Libya's southern desert and follows the nameless main character on his search for his father and, through this, his identity. During the book he is reincarnated a number of times, and assume animal forms as he scours the desert for hints of his identity. Eventually he becomes the spiritual leader of an oasis town, only to watch humanity destroy itself by its own pettiness in the desert wastes. The story parallels the myth of Anubi/Anubis, which I wasn't familiar with before reading.
This book simply oozes with the feel of the desert, which is as much a character as the main protagonist. The seas of sand and rock walls provide limits to man's ambitions, and humble his simplest attempts to be important. The descriptions of the desert are vivid, and come to be inseperable from the narrative. This part was exceptionally well done. However, if the pick-up/put-down test is a good one, then this book failed it miserably. I put it down often an struggled to pick it up. I think there were two reasons. Firstly, the author and/or translator have used such florid prose that I became bored by whole paragraphs. The slow pace and richness with which the desert was described was also applied to every other aspect of the book, and it didn't always make for interesting reading. The second reason is the the book is an allegory told through magical realism, and I have found in the past that if books have a lot of magical realism (i.e. weird events and unexplained allegorical sequences) and I didn't know the story or themes being illustrated, then the events just become a sequence of mysterious 'weird stuff happening'. This happened too often for my liking in this book, and unfortunately detracted from what threatened, in places, to be a marvellous read.