The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.

A former senior editor at The Montreal Gazette, Raymond Beauchemin is the author of Salut! The Quebec Microbrewery Beer Cookbook and editor of several anthologies of Quebec literature in English. He has taught creative writing and international journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. A Massachusetts native, he has lived and worked in Abu Dhabi and currently lives in Ontario. He is married to the writer Denise Roig.

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