Life, love, friendship, politics, desire, betrayal: between ideals and compromises, the return of a Lebanese intellectual to his homeland, twenty-five years later... The protagonists of the novel were inseparable in their youth, then scattered, for many and various reasons. They come together again because of the death of one of them. Some never wanted to leave their native country, others immigrated to the United States, Brazil, or France and followed paths that led them in completely different directions. What do the hotel owner with liberal ideas, the engineer who became rich, or the monk who withdrew from the world to devote himself to contemplation still have in common? Some reminiscences of what they experienced and shared and an incurable nostalgia for the world of their own past.

The reader enters the novel as if into a broken heart. Amin Maalouf's in this case, who never recovered from the loss of that happy Lebanon, generous and protective like the shadow of a cedar tree, where religious communities lived and interacted harmoniously, as in a bustling beehive, from which honey flowed. Maalouf delves into the problems of the Middle East and takes a penetrating and critical look at the country's successive upheavals. A rich, humanitarian novel where nostalgia and hope are combined in the past and the future at the same time.

"In 'The Unsettled', I draw a lot of inspiration from my youth. I spent it with friends who believed in a better world. Even if none of the heroes of this book correspond to a real person, none of them is completely fictional. I drew elements from my dreams, fantasies, regrets, as well as from my memories." A.M.