"One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words--and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zawa--Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew...