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Staff Pick
Blue Desert

Blue Desert

Current price: $16.95
Publication Date: April 20th, 2021
Publisher:
Rootstock Publishing
ISBN:
9781578690442
Pages:
318
Usually Ships in 2 to 5 Days

Staff Reviews

A gorgeously written sweeping epic following a young British girl through womanhood and into old age--through traversing the Sahara Desert and overcoming trauma; living through wars and loss; and bridging family estrangement in London, England in 1970. If I say more there will be spoilers but this is a great novel of historical & literary fiction that reads like a movie, the descriptions are so rich. I would love to see this on the big screen! There’s so much drama, and mesmorizing landscapes, it would be fascinating to watch, as it was to read.

— Sam

Description

2021 IPNE Finalist, Literary Fiction

2021 Women's Book Awards Sarton Finalist, Historical Fiction

Alice George is a headstrong young British woman who finds herself living among the Tuareg, a tribe of nomadic warriors. While the outside world faces the catastrophe of World War I, the Tuareg continue to crisscross the Sahara as a matrilineal society in which the men are veiled and the women hold property-a world in which anything can happen. It is a world well suited to eighteen-year-old Alice, who discovers a life she could never live in corseted England.

In 1917, Alice returns home to a world completely alien to the one she left in the Sahara. Her silence about that life is finally broken sixty years later when she receives a telegram announcing Abu has died in the desert. "Who is Abu?" her husband asks. "My lover," she replies. Thus, begins a weeklong journey of revelation as Alice lays bare her secrets.

Can Alice face her demons and open her heart more fully to the life she once lived in the Sahara-a life she has hidden from her husband and herself? Blue Desert is a story of exile, family secrets, and the power of love.