Yasir, an eighteen-year-old university student with a love of literature and of rock and country music, meets Nour al-Qamar, a woman nearly twice his age, on campus. She draws him into her orbit and eventually invites him to her hometown of Aïn Draham, a beautiful village in the green, mist-wrapped northwest of Tunisia, where she introduces him to her father, her grandmother, and a family friend who keeps a museum of antiquities.
Little by little, Yasir uncovers strange secrets surrounding his new companion — beginning with a cottage said to be occupied by "the lord of the marshes" — and is pulled into a magical world contained within a novel Nour al-Qamar has written, a story of a city of masks. Drawing on the atmosphere of Kafka's The Trial, the book plays oppression, injustice, and the absurd against fantasy, suggesting with deceptively plain language that the law of the jungle can be gentler than the decrees of tyrants.
Sami Mokaddem's first novel written in Arabic, مقبرة الفراشات (The Cemetery of Butterflies) is a genre-blending literary fantasy that walks the reader, unaccompanied, through a minefield of political and social taboos.