Blue Desert

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.

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Release date

Audiobook: 23 January 2024