Rashid spins two tales: one is in part his own, and largely contingent on the other, set some fifty years thence on the outskirts of a small town in colonial Kenya, along the east African coast north of Mombasa, when early one morning in 1899 an Englishman stumbles out of the desert and collapses before a local shopkeeper outside his mosque.

During his convalescence with Turner, he begins quickly to feel guilty about the harsh treatment and false accusations levelled at his original saviours, for he genuinely arrived with almost nothing but the clothes on his back: the only item he seems to have lost is his notebook.

Rehana's father was an Indian trader who settled in Mombasa and married a local woman, but the family is now part of the "Arabised minority"[3] in a town still fresh with the memory of its years of slavery under the sultan.

Amin, like his parents, is to train to become a schoolteacher; Rashid is studying for Oxbridge; and Farida, an academic failure, becomes the family housekeep and small-business dressmaker to the young women of the town.

In the case of Rashid, meanwhile, it is his passionate book-learning that results in his desertion first of his home and eventually "of the entire culture":[3] "The place was stifling him, he said: the social obsequiousness, the medieval religiosity, the historical mendacities.

Rashid misses the socio-political turmoil back home in his isolation as a university student in England; in fact, he never sees his ailing, tragic family again.

Mike Phillips, reviewing it for The Guardian, wrote: Most of Desertion is as beautifully written and pleasurable as anything I've read recently, a sweetly nostalgic recall of a colonial childhood and a vanished Muslim culture, defined by its thoughtful and customary manners, layered by its calendar of festivals and religious observances.

[6]Phillips was unhappy only with the novel's account of Rashid's desertion of his roots, describing it as the least satisfactory, least insightful element of the book [... W]e are told little which illuminates the relationship between the culture of the minority to which he belongs and the chaos which replaces it.

[3]"Desertion and abandonment," according to Phillips, "are the themes that run through this novel, and which link its stories of tragic love with the history and politics of the east African coast.

"[3] Where many have seen Desertion as primarily a political, postcolonial commentary on the imperial relationship with Britain, Phillips discarded this as more or less tangential in the progress of the narrative.

All the relationships in the novel (except for the established one of Ma and Ba, and Farida's with her Mombasa lover Abbas, which is nevertheless "long delayed and littered with obstacles")[3] "are doomed, victims of their time and place.

[8] Rashid, according to Phillips, frequently challenges his own reluctance to repeat the "cliché of the miraculous",[9] spinning his yarns in prose intentionally reminiscent of the Arabian Nights, "echoing with djinns, visions, sudden journeys, disappearances, and the domineering rhythms of the surrounding ocean.