This haunting and elegiac novel provides a moving portrayal of the modern

world encroaching on the old ways in sub-Saharan Africa as told from the

alternating voices of a father in prison and his son on the outside struggling

to survive. Writing letters to his deceased wife from the confines of a prison cell,

the father reflects romantically on their life together and the free-spirited nomadic

life that they enjoyed in their youth; while the son, left to fend for himself in an

increasingly hostile and modernized urban environment falls into petty crime and

gang life in the hardscrabble slum districts of Mauritania's capital city.