About a decade ago, I picked up a book because I liked the cover: bleak street, stark buildings, empty sky, a robed man, his back turned, in the distance; in the foreground, a woman in a burka looking to the left at something we can’t see. When the blurb promised me ‘a Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw, with an insidious power to grip’, I bought it. It gripped. In fact, it scared the living b ... (read more)