They find Kandil Anees in the Outskirts: a contractor with a clean name, a small newspaper, and a school he is quietly paying for himself. They open doors that had been closed. They let him rise. Then they wait for the two men to ruin each other.

What they do not plan for is the day the opponent discovers the plan — and offers his rival a partnership instead.

The alliance makes both men untouchable. It also carries them into an old quarter at the heart of the city, where an official named Khaled has spent twenty-three years refusing to let it be sold. Every fact they use against him is true. None of it is the whole truth. And by the time the walls come down, one of the two friends is already dying — and the other will spend the rest of his life learning what he actually built.

The Titan and the Trace is a novel about power and the price of using it: about the distance between a reputation and a trace, and about the sentence a dying man leaves behind him.

What we build ends. And what we tear down remains.

A contemporary literary novel of the Gulf, translated and rebuilt in English by the author.