It’s the distant future in the Sahara Desert. Archaeologists studying this land of Barzakh unearth the bones of Gara, whose ancient consciousness they extract from his remains for their digital records. A foreigner in his own land, the enslaved Gara has traveled through time in search of a better humanity, inadvertently sowing the seeds of his own destruction... In part one, The Black Way, young Gara remembers his life in the Sahara during the eleventh century. Sold into slavery by his father, he travels across the vast desert with the salt caravan, serves his master for years in the city of Awdaghost, and falls in love with the lovely Vala, who bears his child. Crossing the desert again after a failed slave uprising, he decides to flee from the corruption and injustice of humanity. In part two, The White Way, a dying Gara is visited by al-Khadir, who offers him two trips to the future. Gara readily accepts, waking up in 1905 and joining the caravan of a white archaeologist and his beautiful mistress Vala, who are searching for the ancient lost city of Awdaghost. After seeing the brutality of this era, Gara takes his last leap to the future, in hopes of finding something better. In part three, The Milky Way, Gara finds himself in 2045-- a time when most people have left the dystopian wasteland of Earth, and the Sahara is a dumping ground for radioactive waste. He is forced to work as a penal laborer in the waste storage facilities until he meets an extraterrestrial who helps him escape and find Vala, a guerrilla fighter against the oppressive regime. Gara and Vala fall in love, but she ultimately marries the dictator himself, who is Gara’s own descendant. This will be the first English translation of Barzakh, originally written in French (1993) and translated into Arabic by the author (1996). The unique blend of science fiction and philosophy, rooted in the complex Mauritanian cultural tradition, will be of interest to English speaking readers looking for new voices and perspectives in science fiction. The author, Moussa Ould Ebnou, was born in Boutilimit, Mauritania. He earned his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris, France and is a philosophy professor at the University of Nouakchott in Mauritania. He has written several novels and collections of short stories in French and self-translated many of them into Arabic. He owns DIWAN publishing house, which specializes in publishing Saharan science fiction.