The temporary city

What if death was just a slumber? The soul decomposes in the ether as sugar dissolves in tea. What if — and just like sugar is recovered through distillation — humans discovered a way to bring souls back from that eternal slumber? In the year 84 B.N.A (After the Great Displacement), the company (Al-Ajal) manages to revive the dead to work as slaves in a new world. Adham — recently returned to life — does not accept this reality, so he embarks on the impossible: resisting the surrounding forces and seeking to destroy them. But failure will mean death… and no return to life after that. "The Temporary City" is a novel of human tragedy par excellence, the tragedy of humans by humans. Questions are asked after the ending. But they are not too late, for Adham, the hero of the novel, after returning to life, makes his individual end a new collective beginning. The more we delve into the worlds of this novel, the more certain we become that our world has collapsed. Mishari Al-Ibrahim does to us what he did to his characters, as he projects a science fiction world onto a tangible world, exposing its falsehood, and summons the future into the present so we can see a collective ruin built on individual foundations. A state of maximum emergency, and every character is an alarm bell ringing in this "Temporary City." And in its back streets, a dialogue arises with the "Utopian City," a dialogue of philosophy with its rebellious child who has crossed every red line with his recklessness. But Adham has returned to put an end to this crazy mind after losing trust in humanity.