A novel that follows a group of characters who together determined the fate of the British Mandate in Palestine after the Great Jamail, the Sunni aristocrat that had to forfeit his country in order to make his fortune only to realize too late the real cost; Natalia, the Jewish courtesan who rises to become the Queen of Jerusalem and the mother of nations; Wassif, the artist who records the demise of his culture in song; Thomas, the English officer who after his fifteen minutes of fame spends a life trying to find who he really is; Zaev, the British war hero obsessed by the vision of building a new Jewish empire; Menachem, who rises from Stalin's Gulag to lead the rebelion against the British; Rashid, the teacher who tries to bring his people into the modern age who is hunted down and eventually forced to flee in order to survive, and David, who relentlessly leads the internal struggle against his oown people in order to forge a new nation.
These people and more determined the course of history in this part of the world and give life to the truth that it is only when you have lost everything that you will be ready.