The narrator of The Zahir is an international bestselling novelist who lives in France and enjoys all the privileges his money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years is a journalist who has covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite her professional success and freedom from the conventional constraints of marriage is facing an existential crisis. When she disappears along with a friend, who may or may not be her lover, the authorities question the narrator. The journey to find his wife takes the narrator from the glamorous sumptuousness of Paris to Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Republic and Mikhail’s birthplace, a nation punctured by violence and political uncertainty but where the landscape is infused with unexpected spiritual energy. There, the narrator makes surprising discoveries about himself.