The Ring of Shahryar, set on the eve of the war and in the first months of the Sarajevo siege, describes a pair of separated lovers: Faruk leaves for abroad, while Azra in besieged Sarajevo peruses his manuscript on the apprenticeship of Sheikh Figani, a tenth-century Ottoman poet, withdrawing ever deeper into her inner world. The title of the book alludes to the story of Scheherazade and King Shahryar: Faruk is a storyteller, and the enchantment of Oriental storytelling is again evoked by the intricate, skilfully crafted structure of the novel, which might well be perceived as nothing short of an apology for the art of storytelling: from the frame story set in wartime Sarajevo, we descend through ever new inserted tales as if down a well, ever deeper into the past, to the very beginning of time, when the thought of the Sumerian god Enki called into existence his female half and, through her, the world.