Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause, an Arab-American with a conflicted past trying to cross into Syria to join the fight against a tyrannical regime. On his way he meets Amir, a former Syrian revolutionary whose wife, Daphne, is beautiful and sophisticated but haunted by grief. As Haris and Daphne's individual quests bring them together, they find themselves stuck on the border between hope and helplessness, desire and duty, and past and future.

Elliot Ackerman covered the Syrian Civil War for many years as a journalist, and has written a gripping, morally complex novel about the many lives intersecting on the border of Syria and Turkey, expertly capturing the brutality and pathos of a region caught in the frontlines of chaos and lawlessness.