In the land of Daoistan, freedom has arrived at last. The revolution liberated all, then enslaved everyone, and now it was liberating them again by allowing people to own credit cards. And a man with credit is a man who has the world at his fingertips, or at least a trip into town where the temptations are pretty much as they have always been, only more people can afford them.

Adam's Franchise is a story about Adam and his Franchise. He is not quite sure what that means, but he is a modern man, embracing the economic miracle and taking up a gift shop franchise at a new hotel. There he will sell much the same things that he always sold: baskets, pots, cultural artefacts of various kinds, except at a modern price to foreigners, should they ever care to come to the hotel. The desert that he lives in is not the most beautiful of places, policed by Omar who has to learn how to get out of his hammock, fuelled by Castrol who just loves the smell of petrol and the visions it gives him, and terrorized by nomads and Adam’s volatile brothers-in-law. But if it ever rids itself of the last vestiges of barbarism, both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary, as epitomized by Adam’s indolent, lustful, embittered, rapacious, cynical, superstitious father, Saleem, then harmony–both spiritual and economic–might assert itself. Or maybe, just air-conditioning.

Daoistan exists everywhere, or has done at some time or other. And there have been many Adams.