It is Ajamia’s bittersweet childhood recollections that frame the novel – her memories the few glimpses into her elusive mother Keira’s life, whose subsequent disappearance grounds the novel with a sense of inexorable loss. This same feeling is encapsulated perfectly in Ajamia’s first-person narrative as she endures the cruelty of a Catholic orphanage in Beirut, becomes a nurse at the height of the Lebanese civil war, falls in love, and travels to France and Khomeini’s besieged Iran to escape the war.

The formation of Lebanon’s Green Line, the deplorable conditions of refugee camps, and the systemic exclusion of Palestinians from public spheres form the politically charged backdrop to Ajamia’s tale and imbue the novel with an unshakeable realness. The narrator’s somewhat unreliable childhood recollections and the veil of secrecy cloaking her family’s history coalesce to create an atmospheric book teeming with unresolved questions.

Chung is a master at fostering an inescapable feeling of tension, though the meandering plot can be hard to follow and oddly paced. At times, her storytelling is also heavy-handed as she belabours the political context of the time. That aside, Chasing Shadows never allows the essence of what it really is – a tale of one woman’s self-discovery – to be overwhelmed by the larger political framework at play.