A reporter posted to Lebanon in the early 1980s, covering the Israeli invasion of the time, encounters Miss Alice, an English missionary who is nearing the end of a long life in the region. With memories that go back to World War I and the start of the British Mandate in Palestine, she unfolds the strangely puzzling story of one of her students, Tareq, a talented and charismatic youth who, on leaving school, took up the unlikely calling of a traveling magician. Moving from village to village, from country to city, Tareq observes the growing discontent with the colonial authorities that will erupt in a full-scale rebellion in 1936.

The Lord re-creates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, offering a view, at once panoramic and intimate, of Palestinian society and colonial occupation.