Kit and Port Moresby are an American couple touring North Africa with another man, Turner. As they travel deeper into the Sahara desert, tensions rise and a love triangle emerges: the landscape informs the emotional lives of the characters, who are by turns suffocated by their surroundings and moved by its beauty. Writing in The New York Times, Tennessee Williams called The Sheltering Sky “enthralling . . . powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire.”