Ring

A brokenhearted man leaves behind his familiar Europe to find himself in a desert land equal parts dull and dreamlike, torn between his desire to lose himself in this new country or hide away with the pampered expatriates who reside in a “green zone” known as “the Ring.” When Quentin’s lover announces that she’s leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the but going where? To Tahas , he “a city whose very name sounded exotic.” Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in “the Ring,” to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living—safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.