On a freezing cold December night in 2011, amid political and security turmoil in Egypt, Ahmed Bahy, a photographer in his thirties, is forced into a helicopter and taken to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where he has enjoyed a long history with the Greek monks. A document implicates him in the mysterious death of a monk in the monastery a few hours earlier, forcing him to flee and seek to establish his innocence. With the help of the Bedouin Abi Omran and environmental scientist Ruth, Bahy later discovers rare documents of the monastery that hold grave secrets, and he risks all to uncover the truth. The novel is based on real events related to documents and maps of the monastery’s archives, as well as the demographics of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, and the author brings everything together in his tale: the historical, the geographic, the religious, the ethnic, and the artistic.