Adult Content Warning
This work could have adult content. If you continue, you have agreed that you are willing to see such content.
-
Tags
Summary
Amal Bennani and Evan Merivale have been circling each other like vultures since adolescence: overachieving class rivals who grew up learning the grammar of power in international private schools. When they reunite in their twenties at Black’s—a secretive gentlemen’s club that feeds future diplomats and politicians into the upper echelons of global politics—their old antagonism flares into something sharper and uncontainable. Inside the oak-panelled rooms of the Black Room, everything is performance: rhetoric is bloodsport and alliances are currency. What begins as ideological warfare between the ambitious Amal and aristocratic Evan evolves into a sordid sexual affair charged with rage, deceit, and the adrenaline rush of competition.
Set amidst Europe’s global drift and the cosmopolitanism of the Middle East, this is a novel about forbidden desire, the absurd theatre of politics, and the hunger to be recognized by the very system one wants to dismantle. This work attempts to capture the contradictions of the political elite and the decision rooms in which the future of global civilization is up for discussion. This is the story of two people bound by contempt, longing, and a violent intimacy that refuses translation.