VARIATIONS ON NIGHT AND DAY: A Novel

Full of Machiavellian intrigue and searing political satire, the final volume of Abdelrahman Munif's landmark Cities of Salt trilogy - "the only serious work of fiction that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans, and local oligarchy on a Gulf country" (Edward Said) - chronicles the creation of a fictional Persian Gulf nation through the machinations of a corrupt Arab monarch and conniving British empire builders.
Set in the 1930s, Variations on Night and Day depicts the rise to power of Sultan Khureybit and the emergence of Mooran as a modern nation. Khureybit expands and consolidates his dominion, crushing rival clans by military force and internal opposition with bribes, guile, and assassinations - all in the name of holy war - even as he is being sponsored by the British government, which plays rival sultans off one another to secure its influence in the region. Against this setting we see as well the venality of the Sultan's polygamous household, in which his several wives vie for preeminence through gossip, chicanery, and murder.