Land of the Blind

About this book

Imagine a world where your wealth is measured not by what you carry in your pocket, but by the seconds remaining on your wrist in which you can see the light. In a city governed by a harsh logic, people learn to close their eyes to prolong their lives. A single glance at the sky or at the faces of those we love becomes an expensive luxury, deducted from the counter of a lifetime. Here, people are divided between a sighted few who monopolize light and power, and a frugal majority who walk cautiously through darkness, feeling their way along the walls of life with fingertips that tremble from fear even more than from poverty. In this stifling world stands the young Yahya, the counter on his wrist nearing zero, carrying in his heart the burden of a sick mother. She has only a few minutes of sight left, spending them solely to make sure that her son’s features have not yet faded away. He has no choice but to face the impossible: entering the annual Race of the Blind, a dark challenge resembling a merciless bargain. An enigmatic victory promises an endless reserve of sight; defeat takes away the last speck of light, leaving the loser engulfed in eternal night. But the labyrinth is more than passages and pits. It is a mirror reflecting the soul’s deepest fears and what memory conceals. Alongside a mysterious companion named Layla, whose insight sees beyond the darkness, the city’s secrets begin to crack open. The greatest question, the one that makes regimes tremble, rises to the surface: is true blindness the loss of sight, or the loss of the capacity to feel? And was everything the rulers proclaimed about light merely an illusory shackle made to subjugate hearts? Land of the Blind, by Sayed Galal El Faramawy, is more than a gripping dystopia that takes your breath away. It is a sweeping philosophical and human epic that questions the meaning of freedom, searches the hidden passages of sacrifice, and affirms that no counter, however ruthless, can extinguish the light that rises from the depths of the heart.