The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Layla AlAmmar 2019
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photography © HMoodboard/Getty Images
Layla AlAmmar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008284442
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008284466
Version: 2019-01-16
To Mom, my first reader, for handing me a book all those years ago.
‘At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.’
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.’
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: A Grotesque Pandemonium
Chapter 8: The Sleep of Reason …
Chapter 10: Who More Is Surrendered?
Chapter 12: He Cannot Make Her Out
Chapter 13: What One Does to the Other
Chapter 17: Those Specks of Dust
Chapter 20: You Will Not Escape