The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey

A captivating travel memoir set in the Middle East about cross-cultural dissonance and a quixotic quest to find home.

While travelling to his grandfather's ancestral town in rural eastern Turkey, journalist John Zada is mistakenly hauled off an overnight bus at a military roadblock and pulled into a dragnet searching for outlawed rebels. During that abrupt encounter Zada experiences a series of vivid flashbacks from his life and travels in the Middle East, which led him to that dangerous moment.

The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey: An East-West Memoir is a collection of interlocking travel stories tied to a decades-long quest through the Arab World to find a more enduring sense of home. Born to westernized Arab parents, and driven by his discontent with North American life, Zada throws himself headlong into the Middle East to find what he believes to be the missing part of himself.

That journey, first as student and then as a roving journalist, takes him from the cosmopolitan boulevards of Cairo, Beirut and Dubai to the far-flung mountains of Kurdistan and the Sahara Desert. Mirroring the author's wanderings is his lifelong mentor, Kamal Bey: a spinner of yarns with a secret government job who, like Zada, also uncomfortably straddles civilizations.

A kaleidoscopic memoir that is also a travelogue and work of reportage evoking the writing of Ryszard Kapuściński, The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey is at its heart a reverse-diaspora story. Its pastiche of surreal and remarkable tales serves as an oblique warning about the danger of identity obsessions.