Los desorientados

Adam, a historian approaching fifty, has lived in Paris for twenty-five years, having turned his back on the Middle Eastern homeland that war tore apart. When word reaches him that Mourad — once his closest friend, later estranged — is dying, Adam returns for the first time in a quarter century.

Over sixteen days, recorded in his notebook, Adam reconnects with the surviving members of the joyful, idealistic student group they once called the "club of the Byzantines": friends who dreamed of building a better country before the war dispersed them across France, the United States, and Brazil. Some stayed; some fled; all were marked. Their reunion forces Adam to weigh what remains of youthful ideals, wounded loyalties, and a lost Orient.

Les Désorientés is one of Amin Maalouf's most personal novels — a meditation on exile, memory, friendship, and identity, in which the "disoriented" have quite literally lost their East.