Yalo was a soldier on one of the many sides in Lebanon's sectarian civil war, and then he becomes a deserter and a thief, a nightwatchman in Paris, an arms smuggler, and then a rapist. And then he falls in love with his victim - who turns him in to the police. This novel is a modern "Thousand and One Nights", a series of confessions extracted under torture, a recitation of all of his memories, all of his sorrows, all of his guilt - and other crimes which his interrogators need him to confess to.