The novel’s young protagonist inhabits a world of kings, ancient dynasties, distant lands, and vanished empires. He spends hours poring over atlases, tracing royal genealogies, and searching history for a sense of grandeur and order that shields him from the uncertainties of the world around him. Beyond that private universe, Lebanon in the 1970s is living through what will prove to be its final carefree years. Family gatherings, summers in the mountains, first love, long conversations, and childhood games continue as though nothing could disturb the rhythm of everyday life. But war is approaching—at first as a distant, almost imperceptible shadow, and then as a force that transforms everything.

As the country around him begins to fracture, the imagined kingdoms of his childhood collapse with it. The end of one world becomes inseparable from the end of another: Lebanon loses its innocence, and the young narrator loses his childhood. The Name of the Prince is an autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about a vanished Lebanon, the end of adolescence, and the ways memory preserves a world that history has destroyed.