In a voice as dim as a lighthouse on a rainy night, he said, "Beware of loving a woman who loves bridges.†?'Once upon a September in Paris...Still heartsick over the break-up of his relationship with the alluring, elusive novelist Hayat, the narrator of The Dust of Promises finds himself adrift in Paris, where he has come to receive a photography award.His photograph of a traumatised war-orphan has been declared profoundly affecting by the judges, but he knows that no picture can ever fully capture the desolation and destruction he has witnessed in his Algerian homeland. When he stumbles into an art exhibition on one of the capital's side streets, he is struck by the power of the paintings and feels impelled to learn more about the artist – an Algerian exile whose painful longing for the country he has lost shines out of his work. The artist is none other than Khaled, the man who haunted the pages of...

'Love always sits in a seat other than the one we were expecting it to, right alongside the place where we expected love to be'In the midst of the Algerian civil war, Hayat is a young novelist trapped in a loveless marriage. While her husband, a high-ranking officer, preoccupies himself with politics, Hayat finds freedom from her highly regimented life in the world of her writing. There she weaves a passionate story for her characters.But the line between fiction and reality blurs when she falls for a man who seems to have walked straight out of the pages of her notebook, a man who seduces her, instead of her heroine, with his silence.As love on paper becomes a forbidden love lived out in the dark corners of a broken city, Hayat's country convulses with political upheaval. In a place where those who dare to write the truth are made to pay a heavy price, she and her characters will discover that no one can truly be the author of their own destiny.

The Bridges of Constantine is a poignant fresco of Algeria over the last 50 years, a searing love story and a hymn to a lost city. Khaled, a former revolutionary in the Algerian war of liberation has been in self-exile in Paris for two decades, disgusted by the corruption that now riddles the country he once fought for. He has become a celebrated painter, and at the opening of one of his exhibitions, Hayat, the daughter of his old revolutionary commander, unexpectedly reenters Khaled's life. Hayat had been just a child when he last saw her, but she has now become a seductive young novelist.Khaled is consumed with passion for her, and she comes to embody the homeland and the city he still grieves for – the city he paints over and over again in his canvases. Through Hayat, his past is breathed back into life and he at last begins to confront his feelings about Algeria. But for Hayat, as elusive as she is tender, the question of what one should yearn for is not so...