Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed, Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg deserts of the Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust, and loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood and gold. Gold Dust is a classic story of the brotherhood between man and beast, the thread of companionship that is all the difference between life and death in the desert. It is a story of the fight to endure in a world of limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society.

Ibrahim al-Koni was born in Libya in 1948. A Tuareg who writes in Arabic, he spent his childhood in the desert and learned to read and write Arabic when he was twelve. He is the author of many novels, including Anubis, Gold Dust, The Puppet, The Seven Veils of Seth, The New Oasis, and The Scarecrow (AUC Press, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2015). He was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Prize for Literature in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.

Elliott Colla is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University. He has translated a number of Arabic novels, including Ibrahim Aslan’s The Heron and Idris Ali’s Poor (both AUC Press, 2007). He was runner up in the 2009 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Gold Dust.