ABANDON: A ROMANCE (2008)

Santa Barbara graduate student John Macmillan is feverishly toiling over his dissertation on Sufi poetry when a mysterious package he collected on a research trip to Damascus leads to a meeting with a fragile woman named Camilla. Part love story, part treasure hunt for esoteric manuscripts (even the title seems to be an inversion of A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance), Abandon is rife with double meanings and mind games. Lavishly evoking both the delicacies of Persian art and the tentative explorations of two people falling in love, Iyer's novel proves to be a heady conundrum worth puzzling out.