A novelist’s search for the wife who left him without an explanation takes him on a long journey from France to Central Asia where he discovers something new about the meaning of life, marriage, and his own celebrity
The narrator of The Zahir* is an international bestselling novelist who lives in France and enjoys all the privileges his money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years is a journalist who has covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite her professional success and freedom from the conventional constraints of marriage is facing an existential crisis. When she disappears along with a friend, who may or may not be her lover, the authorities question the narrator.

The journey to find his wife takes the narrator from the glamorous sumptuousness of Paris to Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Republic and Mikhail’s birthplace, a nation punctured by violence and political uncertainty but where the landscape is infused with unexpected spiritual energy. There, the narrator makes surprising discoveries about himself.

*According to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the idea of the Zahir comes from the Islamic tradition. In Arabic it means visible, present, incapable of being unnoticed. It could be the person who occupies every psychic space of another person’s life as an object of passion, obsession, and inspiration.