Book description
Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of
whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her
adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy
and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. Travelling
through Morocco and Algeria she eats pigeon pie with a family of
cannabis farmers, and learns about the habits of djinns; she encounters
citizens whose protest against the tyrannical King Hassan takes the form
of attaching colanders to their television aerials - a practice he soon
outlaws - and comes across a stone-age method of making olive-oil, still
going strong. She allows a ten-year-old to lead her into the
fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers - where she makes a
good friend. Plunging southwards, regardless, into the desert, she at
last shares a lunch of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her old friends,
in a green and pleasant palm grove perfumed by flowering henna: once, it
seems, the favourite scent of the Prophet Mohammed. She discovers at
journey's end that life in a date-farming oasis, haunting though its
songs may be, is not so simple and uncomplicated as she has imagined.
Annie Hawes has legions of fans. Her writing has the well-built flow of
fiction and the self-effacing honesty of a journal.
Annie Hawes, originally from Shepherd's Bush, divides her time
between Liguria in Italy, the west coast of Ireland and Whitechapel in
London. Her first book, Extra Virgin, was a worldwide bestseller and
she has written two further books Ripe for the Picking and Journey to
the South.
