The Dreamer's Guillotine: A novel in which the specter of isolation haunts memory, and the homeland becomes more of a place of sorrow than a haven for life. Jalal Barjas writes with deliberate bitterness about love as a postponed salvation, and about prison as an extension of larger walls within. The story intertwines the betrayal of the state and the disappointment of women, in a transparent internal narrative that exposes the dreamer's fragility as he is slowly led to his moral death. A novel about a man who was released from prison, but remained in it.