"Marrakech runs on mint tea, orange blossom, and grudges older than the medina walls"
Yasmin Benali is a pharmacist from Lyon who reads every label, counts every pulse, and has told her father she is at a conference in Montpellier. She is actually in Marrakech with forty-one cassette tapes her grandmother mailed to him over twenty years, every one of them unopened until Yasmin found them in a shoebox. She has an address near the spice square, a Walkman, and a page of taxi phrases in Darija. She has never met her grandmother, and her grandmother doesn't know she's coming.
Her bed is in Room Limoun, the most photographed room in the Riad Zitoun Social, a two-hundred-year-old riad hidden behind a blank ochre wall off Rue Riad Zitoun el-Kedim. Her roommates are Harlow Quinn, a lifestyle creator with two point three million followers who calls the riad her secret while standing in front of a sign with four thousand reviews; Brynn, Harlow's exhausted assistant; and Petra, a soft-spoken Slovenian knitter who hands out linden-honey sweets and was moved into the room by the system in the middle of the night, again and again, however often the night desk moved her back. Rafa, the Ibiza survivor, is working the zero-proof rooftop bar. Salma runs the night desk and her mother Lalla Latifa runs the kitchen. The white Hub behind reception, which they call l-Bendir, keeps turning amber.
Yasmin tells Harlow that orange-blossom water is for pastries, not for drinking by the bottle, and becomes Pharma Girl in a story that draws three thousand comments, most of them unkind. An old herbalist warns them that some flowers belong at the door, never in the mouth. When Brynn collapses at a neighbourhood hammam with a slow heart and halos round the lights, the clinic's standard screen can't say why, and Harlow tells her followers it's just Marrakech belly. Then comes Sunday's rooftop tagine night: forty lanterns, nine tagines, a Gnawa troupe, a skincare brand's glittering banner, and Harlow live to her followers with a silver flask in her hand.
Age: 25
Type: Pharmacist from Lyon meeting her grandmother for the first time
Fatal Flaw: Reads the label on everything, including people
Role: Protagonist
Age: 29
Type: Soft-luxury lifestyle creator from Arizona
Fatal Flaw: Drinks the orange-blossom water meant for pastries, and films it
Role: Victim
Age: Mid-30s
Type: Soft-spoken Slovenian knitter
Fatal Flaw: Remembers what everyone likes, and everything anyone has done
Role: Roommate
Age: 26
Type: Zero-proof rooftop bartender, survivor of Ibiza
Fatal Flaw: Says yes before he's finished hearing the question
Role: Ally
Age: 79
Type: Grandmother who talked to a cassette recorder for twenty years
Fatal Flaw: Will feed you before she forgives you
Role: Matriarch
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "The First Glass"
The reception desk of the Riad Zitoun Social was a slab of cedar in an alcove off the courtyard, and at four in the morning it was the only lit thing in the building apart from the fountain.
The riad was two hundred years old and built, like all the old houses of the medina, backwards. From the outside, from the narrow derb that bent off Rue Riad Zitoun el-Kedim, you saw nothing: a blank ochre wall, a studded wooden door with a brass hand of Fatima for a knocker, a little tiled plaque. Then you stepped through and the whole house opened up around you like a secret, three storeys of carved cedar galleries and white plaster stucco looking down into a courtyard of green-and-white zellige, where four orange trees stood in each corner of the fountain and dropped their petals into the water.
In March the orange trees were in blossom. The whole city was. Marrakech in March smelled like somebody had knocked over the world's largest bottle of perfume and nobody could be bothered to clean it up. The blossom was called zhar, and the water they distilled from it, ma' zhar, went into pastries and tea and the silver sprinklers they used to bless the hands of wedding guests, and at four in the morning, with the courtyard cool and still, the scent was so thick Salma could almost see it hanging over the fountain like steam.
She was twenty-two. She did the night desk four nights a week and studied English literature at Cadi Ayyad University the rest of the time, which was how she could say Llah y hdik and passive-aggressive in the same breath. Her textbook was open on the desk beside the keyboard: Wuthering Heights, spine cracked at the chapter where everybody is miserable, which was all of them. She had been trying to write an essay about revenge. She had written the word Revenge and underlined it twice and then got distracted by the Slovenian.
Beside the textbook sat a glass of mint tea she had poured an hour ago and forgotten, gone cold and syrupy, the mint leaves slumped at the bottom like drowned men.
And behind the desk, on a little shelf between a brass lantern and a framed photo of the riad's original owner, old Hajj Mustapha, frowning at the camera in 1961, the Hub breathed.
It was a white disc about the width of a man's palm. The installer from FreeToWander had screwed it to the shelf three months ago along with smart locks on every door, a tablet at reception, a laminated sign of the app's cartoon backpack mascot, and a promise that the riad would now be "a connected guest experience." It ran the Wi-Fi. It ran the locks and the lights and the room assignments and the little fridge on the roof terrace that the owners had installed for the influencers. Round its rim ran a ring of soft blue light that rose and fell, rose and fell, as slow as breathing.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Riad Zitoun Social, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I literally found this place by accident. No one knows about it. It's giving hidden" — Harlow Quinn, lifestyle creator
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I bought a rug. I would like to go back. I am going back. I have told my company." — Kenji Watanabe, Osaka
☠ "the first glass is gentle, as life." — @HostelReaper