The King's Debt

Rawan returns from a stint in Tunisia days before the bloodied corpse of her sister, Samra, is found in the desert. With Samra and Saleem's impending wedding plummeting into a tragic twist, Rawan vows to avenge her sister's untimely death with Saleem's assistance.

Set by the shores of the Egyptian Red Sea, Samaa Ayman's gripping first novel explores, in luminous prose, the affected piety and false virtue underneath the fabric of a rigid, conservative society, and forces us to question the darkest crevices of our very own nature.