Cities of Salt 3 · Variations on Night and Day

Cities of Salt is a petrofiction novel by Abdul Rahman Munif. It was first published in Lebanon in 1984 and was immediately recognized as a major work of Arab literature. It was translated into English by Peter Theroux. The novel, and the quintet of which it is the first volume, describes the far-reaching effects of the discovery of huge reserves of oil under a once-idyllic oasis somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.