"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."-Laila Lalami,
From the author of and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" () comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice.
Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in , Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."