Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad

TAMANRASSET is a novel set at the beginning of the 20th Century on the fringes of the Sahara desert, before airplanes or telephones, when there were no maps of the desert, when the people living on the edges of the Sahara did not know what was out there, and when France and Great Britain were only the most recent world powers trying to exploit the region. There, the lives of four protagonists become entwined: A mature Foreign Legionnaire who has made his home in the harsh life of France’s desert fortresses; the young Arab son of the Sharif that leads the tribes in the western Sahara fighting to protect his family; an ambitious American archeologist in charge of the excavations at Carthage; and a young Swedish widow in Fez who adopts Islam in order to earn a place in the community there. Each of them suffers a crisis of alienation, and it is only through the chance intersection of their lives that they become bound together and elect to influence a world that stands on the brink of vanishing forever. Like his prior novels, a trilogy of World War I adventures which were inspired by early espionage fiction, TAMANRASSET reinvents the classic pulp fiction adventures of the French Foreign Legion while telling a new story that takes place against a backdrop of real historical events in Morocco and Algeria in the years 1900 to 1908. For readers of Ken Follett, Bernard Cornwell, and Philippa Gregory, TAMANRASSETis a novel about loss and isolation and the fragile, often transitory bonds that bring people together.