A Frenchman, driven by the desire to escape himself, takes a job at the French high school in Abu Dhabi and settles there with his wife and child. The family’s path soon crosses with that of a Sri Lankan immigrant who arrived in the Persian Gulf thirty years earlier and has been drifting from family to family to survive. Told with sharp lyricism, Jérôme Ferrari’s tale of parallel lives in exile is a heart-wrenching examination of a relationship between strangers. Expatriate and immigrant emerge as two different ways of being a foreigner in the oil-rich Emirates, one prosperous and the other impoverished, each wandering and seeking but separated from one another in a fashion that empathy cannot bridge.
