Iraqi Kurdistan at the turn of the twenty-first century is a territory ruled by strongmen, revolutionaries, fixers, bureaucrats and the "Barons" who control everything from livestock and land to Kurdish cultural life. Defying the absolute power wielded by the Barons, a band of friends led by a poet embarks on an odyssey to find the bodies of two lovers killed unjustly by the authorities. The Barons respond by attempting to crush these would-be avengers, though their real war is waged against the imagination itself - a prized, elusive commodity for which intellectuals, merchants, political elites and humble workers all search in one way or another. Told by several unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscope of fragments that all eventually cohere, this novel is a lyrical allegory of contemporary Kurdistan - so much in the news nowadays, but so little understood.

Bakhtiyar Ali was born in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, in 1966, and currently resides in Cologne, Germany. He is a novelist as well as a literary critic, essayist and poet, and is widely considered to be one of the most prominent Kurdish writers by readers in Kurdistan as well as in the Kurdish diaspora. He has published nine novels and several collections of essays and poetry.