This is a book of strange accounts, free-floating threads that tangle and knot as a story unfolds: a dead father returns to rule his household from beyond the grave, a man awakes on the outskirts of a strange town with no memory of how he arrived there, a woman sings every sound in the world. And then the line that binds them: a journey undertaken by Bahr, an Egyptian returned home after years abroad, and his amanuensis—our narrator—a journalist employed to document Bahr’s tour of magically-imbued sites, which offer us glimpses into a parallel and miraculous reality. But the pilgrimage begins to expose cracks in the premises of the story we are being told. How reliable is our narrator? Even as the novel’s lines of incident and narrative intersect and cohere, these breaks and glitches widen, and we find ourselves in a world that is bound by its own dissolution, which comes together as it comes apart. This is an astonishing and delicately powerful novel of identity and trauma, of exile, loss and revolution, a prose poem that weighs the collapse of individuals and buildings and societies alike against our capacity to love and endure.