Honestly, I feel like I must have missed something. This follows several generations of a family in Oman, mostly focusing on their relationships and the way things change as the generations pass by. It jumps around the timeline seemingly arbitrarily, but is largely focused on Abdallah's musings as he takes a flight to Frankfurt, always coming back to him on the plane.

But it doesn't seem to actually say anything for all the time it took me to read it. It seemed like there was some sort of revelation Abdallah is supposed to have, but after a whole book of things being relatively straightforward the ending is some sort of abstract fever dream? Hardly anyone's story seems to tie up in a way that is at all satisfying or even, you know, tied up. There's some mystery around what happened to Abdallah's mother, and then the reveal is from (yet another) someone we were hardly familiar with.

And I guess that's probably part of the point, that people's lives don't turn out like a storybook. But it was wildly unsatisfying to read about.