The book is, thus, in part about the sins of fathers and how they can return to haunt the present, the personal colliding with the political to produce what the novel describes as "untidy history." At the start, Hamburg is a city still trying to expiate its own guilt at playing host to the 9/11 plotters, the so-called Hamburg Cell. As the story progresses, the different responses to the resulting political pressures are played out in the complex internal politics of the German intelligence and security communities— a running feud "between those determined to defend civil rights at all costs, and those determined to curtail them in the name of national security" (103).

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 327