Once upon a September in Paris…
Still heartsick over the break-up of his relationship with the alluring , elusive novelist Hayat, the narrator of The Dust of Promises finds himself adrift in Paris, where he has come to receive a photography award.
His photograph of a traumatised war-orphan has been declared profoundly affecting by the judges, but he knows that no picture can ever fully capture the desolation and destruction he has witnessed in his Algerian homeland.
When he stumbles into an art exhibition on one of the capital’s side streets, he is struck by the power of paintings and feels impelled to learn more about the artist – an Algerian exile whose painful longing for the country he has lost shines out of his work.
The artist is none other than Khaled, the man who haunted the pages of Haat’s first novel, just as the narrator was inextricably entangled in her second. As the two men embark on a tentative of friendship, a twist of fate brings  Hayat herself to France, where their destinies will once again collide.

The final novel in the international bestselling trilogy from ‘the literary phenomenon’ (Elle) Ahlem Mosteghanemi, The Dust of Promises is a haunting, elegiac story of love, memory and betrayal – and of what it means to come home.