The novel is told from two viewpoints, in a double time scheme. On the one hand is Nour, a Tuareg boy who finds himself part of an uprising against encroaching French colonists that took place in north Africa between 1910-12. On the other is Lalla, a striking and indomitable orphan girl descended from the same blue-robed clan as Nour. She grows up on the coast of Morocco during some unspecified time after the second world war – perhaps the 1970s – before travelling to France.