The novel starts with a strong ScF feel -- the protagonist is 'jessed', mind-altered to be loyal to her owner; holographic projections are common in her household; and there is a harni, apparently a human body controlled by an AI. It's impossible to tell at first where or when the story is, as no names are given. The high-tech components are combined with a middle-eastern flavor: veiled women, proscribed male/female public interactions, separate households for the husband and wife. Although the female protagonist is owned by the husband but serves in the woman's household, while the male harni is owned by the wife but runs the man's household.
Hariba loathes the harni at first, but they come to love each other; the rest of the book -- most of it -- is them trying to live together, and eventually escape to the "E.C.U", after which it is revealed that they live in Morocco. There's been political conjoining, or else it's an alternate world -- a North African Alliance, the ECU, a North and Central American union.
One strange thing about the story is the shortage of electronic communication, at least in Morocco. A good portion of the book goes by without mentioning anything like TV, radio, or the internet -- apart from the games and projections of the mistress of the household. Later "cardboard phones" are mentioned, probably the printable foldable cell phones of current development. The ECU has "slates" which seem to be the portable communication and entertainment center. The ECU is wealthy, able to take in a care for the refugees; Morocco seems stratified, with holograms and advanced brain surgery for the rich, and selling funeral wreaths to survive for the poor. The world of today, projected forward a bit.
I'm not sure what I got out of the book. The plot is simple enough: girl meets boy, girl and boy escape, girl loses boy due to his different nature, wth complications from the girl's family hating or fearing the boy, and random intervention by the police. Literarily one might talk about the nature of love -- is jessing, or harni impressing, a metaphor for human love, or a different angle upon it? We see a few other viewpoints, such as Hariba's mother, or her old best friend, whose family escape the Nekropolis to a flat, but who isn't in love with her husband, who gets taken by the police for helping the escape.