The handover happened at seven, as it always did. Twelve beds occupied. Three in observation. Two pending discharge. One that Fouad does not want to talk about.
Dr. Kamel Rahmouni begins his final night shift before vacation at the Centre Hospitalier Mustapha Bacha in Algiers - the hospital everyone calls Mustapha. Between 7 PM and the Fajr prayer, he and Nurse Dalila Benmoussa will face everything the city sends through the emergency room doors: the predictable and the impossible, the cases that follow protocol and the ones that rewrite it. A novel about one night in an Algerian emergency room - the medicine, the exhaustion, the dark humor, and the particular kind of faith required to do this work in a system that gives you less than enough and expects you to make it stretch.