Shumaisi, Paperback/Turki Al-Hamad

The year is 1970, a period of crisis in the Arab world. Twenty-year-old Hisham has enrolled at university in Riyadh to study politics and economics. But this city has more than academic qualifications to offer a man of Hisham's mettle, and he soon discovers a strange underworld of alcohol and prostitution where fear, pleasure and politics merge.