The boy's highland village
Chapter 1
The narrator is a boy taken from a tribal family in the Yemeni highlands and handed over as a hostage, a child whose safety guarantees his relatives' obedience to the state. His home is left behind at the start; the book locates it only as highland tribal country, so we place it in the green mountains around Ibb.
Chapter 1
inferredThe novel does not name the narrator's home village, only that his family are highland tribespeople held to their loyalty by the hostage system. This marks a representative point in the fertile highlands around Ibb, north of Taiz, the kind of country such a family would have come from.
