Traveling in Morocco in 1883, French cavalry officer Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) experienced a spiritual awakening. Seeking an identity that balances his zeal, faith, and ambition, he reinvents himself again and again, becoming a Trappist monk in Syria, then a gardener for Poor Clare nuns in Israel, then a priest and lexicographer in Algeria. In this inventive yet accessible novel-in-verse, William Woolfitt follows Foucauld's journey from dissipated youth to martyr, telling the gripping story of a man who devotes himself to radical compassion and comes to see the Tuareg people of the Sahara as his brothers, a mud hut in the desert as his earthly home.