Blue Desert

<p><strong style=color: rgba(29 29 29 1)>2021 IPNE Finalist Literary Fiction</strong></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(29 29 29 1)>2021 Women's Book Awards Sarton Finalist Historical Fiction</strong></p><p><br></p><p>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. </p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(87 87 87 1)>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? </span><strong style=color: rgba(87 87 87 1)><em>Blue Desert</em></strong><span style=color: rgba(87 87 87 1)> is a story of exile family secrets and the power of love.</span></p>