BOOK REVIEW
Blue Desert by Celia Jeffries (2021, Rootstock Publishing)
Sixty years after Alice George lived in the Sahara desert
with the nomadic Tuarig tribe, she received a telegram telling her that Abu was
dead. "Who is Abu?" her husband asks. "My lover," she
replies. This is the set up for Blue Desert, the new novel by Celia Jeffries.
The story braids the two narratives of Alice's time spent in the Sahara during
the years of World War I and 1970s London, during the week she tells her
secrets to her husband for the first time.
The story of Alice’s time spent with the Taurig people is
particularly fascinating. The Sahara is land mass larger than the continental
United States and is seemingly hostile to human life. But this tribe found a
way to live in harmony with that environment. Add to that, women were valued
and held power within their society in a way that contrasted markedly with the British
society Alice had left behind in the early 1900s.
One of the main themes in Blue Desert is how survival and
love can be entwined and take many forms. What helped Alice survive in the
desert was acceptance—of her situation and of the people she found herself
among. What helped Martin survive the WWI was acceptance of the altered state
of the world. Finally, what made their marriage work was total acceptance of
each other as they were.
If you like historical fiction with a feminist bent, Blue
Desert is the book for you.
Read my author interview of Celia Jeffries, here.
Learn more about the book Blue Desert and author Celia Jeffries on her website, here.
Watch the YouTube video of the Cambridge Common Writers launch of Blue Desert, here, where you can listen to Celia read from her novel and answer questions about the story and her writing process.
