'Love always sits in a seat other than the one we were expecting it to, right alongside the place where we expected love to be' In the midst of the Algerian civil war, Hayat is a young novelist trapped in a loveless marriage. While her husband, a high-ranking officer, preoccupies himself with politics, Hayat finds freedom from her highly regimented life in the world of her writing. There she weaves a passionate story for her characters. But the line between fiction and reality blurs when she falls for a man who seems to have walked straight out of the pages of her notebook, a man who seduces her, instead of her heroine, with his silence. As love on paper becomes a forbidden love lived out in the dark corners of a broken city, Hayat's country convulses with political upheaval. In a place where those who dare to write the truth are made to pay a heavy price, she and her characters will discover that no one can truly be the author of their own destiny. The second novel in the international bestselling trilogy from 'the literary phenomenon' (Elle), Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses is a powerful story of love, identity and liberation.

Picking up where The Bridges of Constantine ended, Mosteghanemi's second novel begins in war-torn Algeria in the 1990s. Trapped in a loveless marriage to a high-ranking military man, a novelist decides to lose herself in her writing. But in an unexpected twist, what she writes begins to take on flesh. She falls in love with the story's male protagonist, and a love on paper becomes a forbidden love lived out in the dark corners of a battered city. After all, the best and truest loves are those we find when we're looking for something else. With poetic finesse, the author weaves fact and fiction to convey a chapter in Algeria's history as no one else could.

Ahlem has carved a place for herself as one of the most important writers of the Arab world