Nil Value

Forty days after burying the grandfather who raised him, Tarek Hassan Mansour sits in a cracked plastic chair in a Dubai garden scheduled for demolition and feels the air move. Tarek is a Chartered Valuation Surveyor, a man who knows the price of everything-he has just signed a report valuing his grandfather's house, roses and all, at nil. But on the fourteenth night of the lunar month, something passes through the garden that cannot be measured: an experience of love, memory and meaning that will not fit into any column of a spreadsheet.

So begins one long night in Al Safa, where a fortieth-anniversary gathering fills the house with fatta, konafa and arguments about rental law, and where a childhood friend named Layla-barefoot, newly arrived from London, carrying a burn scar and a buried Quality Street tin-becomes the centre of a reckoning Tarek is not equipped to have. Haunted by the voice of his own valuation reports, a voice that can explain away anything, he must decide whether what he felt was revelation or grief with good lighting.

A love letter to Arabic literature, to Egypt's vanished gardens, and to the things the market cannot price, Nil Value is a novel about memory, migration, the men who build Dubai's towers, and the difference between nil and nothing.