The Secrets of Folder 42 opens with the author forgetting his laptop and notebook in a taxi. What a chance!!
The reader is introduced to the protagonists via two storylines playing out across continents and true historical events. Their stories proceed separately and eventually interweave spectacularly. There's successful novelist Christine McMillan - the unrivalled pioneer of new American realism who is facing writer's block, and her friend from college days, Brandon, a former US soldier turned literary agent who is mad about books. He declares "the most beautiful thing is the tightrope walk between reality and fiction" - echoing Sebbata's own words that it is "the art of the novel to make reality and fiction one" - and suggests that the secret past of Christine's father in Morocco could be the subject for her next novel. There's Rachid Bennacer, a porter in Christine's hotel in Morocco, who is a young PhD literature researcher studying the 1989 novel A Moroccan Jigsaw Puzzle.
The passion for thoughtful and serious reading - by the characters as well as the author - is shared to the reader, each chapter opening with a quotation from a different literary work, the full list of titles and authors having been suggested by the illusive and mysterious publisher of A Moroccan Jigsaw Puzzle. All are works that consider issues of human values and dignity, which is central to unravelling the riddles of The Secrets of Folder 42.
In the other storyline, Zouhair Belkacem, nicknamed Kasparov at school for being the up-and-coming Moroccan chess champion, is shunted off to medical school in Moscow by his wealthy lawyer mother to avoid being charged with raping their underage maid at their summer beach house. He becomes great pals with Sergei Kryachkov, who has a passion, like him, for reading, especially Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, a book that surfaces at crucial moments, a totem, throughout Sebbata's thrilling novel. After becoming a hostage in the 2002 Chechen resistance fighters' seizure of Moscow's Dubrovka Theatre, and escaping incarceration in Siberia, Zouhair returns to Morocco after many years. It's crunch day for everyone when, in a taxi, he finds a laptop and notebook.
