Moon is a young schoolteacher who teaches, both in the Spanish R.C. school and the Madrassah Arab school. The year is two thousand and seventeen. He meets Pete, an unknown giant of a man, when Moon and Ruben, Moon's eccentric English friend, are threatened by a band of thugs led by the violent drunken father of one of Moon´s pupils. The incident in which the father and his friends fare rather badly leaves Moon and Pete with the dilemma of having to rescue the girl-child Malak, her mother, and twelve-year-old sister. They "borrow" a high-speed powerboat complete with an unwilling pilot and set out for the Sahara, with the idea of taking the family to find the protection of their maternal grandparents. Their initial journey towards southern Morocco from where they hope to cross into Algerian Sahara is short-lived when they realise that there is no passable frontier. They turn back to attempt to get past Gibraltar and the Straits and eventually land in a place called Marsa Ben Mhidi on the Algerian coast. They are arrested by a disagreeable police sergeant, and his colleagues, but a military doctor who attends to a sick Pete transmits a message to an old friend of Pete´s who turns out to be mysterious General with a notorious history....................................................................1991 Algeria a legitimately elected government is put down by the military, with 103000 voters slaughtered, men women and children. Years later Libya is torn apart by Western powers seeking to change the status quo in the country. As a result, the whole North of Africa is destabilized..................................................... A small child and her family are cast by chance into the Sahara desert, a landmass encompassing all countries of the North. Her presence acts as a flux in the coming together of the hundreds of thousand tribesmen of the sandy wastes, in an attempt to tell the people of the West what actually is happening in this desolate corner of the world, and to bring to a halt the Machiavellian working of those major companies and states who under the guise of "The war on terror" seek to rape the wealth of the area. Malak is the child who dreams and dares to face universal adversity in her quest for happiness. .........................................................................Malak is a stunning evocation of North Africa and its encounter with Western civilisation seen through the relationship between Pete, fleeing to Morocco to escape his mental demons by seeking solace in a pre-modern world, and a family who in escaping from their violent, drunken father to the Algerian Sahara, experience other problems and persecution. The splendid descriptions of North African life, of bazaars and souks beaches and ports and the towns, rich valleys, and deserts of Morocco and Algeria, are given depth by insight into the immediate history of the area and two upheavals, a rebellion, and a revolution. OGarra brings an unusual sympathy and insight into this largely unknown world, the southern 'Other' of Western civilisation, and through his familiarity and insight probes and brings out our common humanity in this tale of struggle and adventure. Camus rendered North Africa alien and incomprehensible in 'L'Etranger'; Ogarra brings that world to us and shows us our own face in the mirror of his writing even as he critically confronts the dehumanising and distorting effects of the media glare in our globally connected world in which all the outer things are stripped bare. Albeit in the company of a courageous girl-child, her family and her newly acquired band of personages who seek only to save her from her own valour which finds her time and again plunging headfirst into the abyss. Arjun Sen (Author of " Once a crow and then it was day")