Lead Review

  • Book: Of Sea and Sand
  • Location: Iraq, Oman, The Empty Quarter
  • Author: Denyse Woods

Review Author: tripfiction

Location

Content

4.5*
A book divided into 4 parts. The first part details the arrival of Gabriel in Oman to stay with his sister Annie. It is the 1980s, a period when tourism was unknown in the country. He is escaping the consequences of his actions back in Ireland. There is quite some backstory in this family and it all has to do with Max, his older brother. Unconscious sibling rivalry perhaps but the trauma he has left behind has affected the family members and a much wider circle. The mystery of his actions is revealed at the end of the book.

Essentially Gabriel temporarily lives with Annie and her husband in a house where he senses a spirit, a jinnaya who comes to him and only he can see. I am not usually taken with stories that have other-worldly dimensions but the author is a naturally gifted writer who can weave a good and convincing story. To him the woman with whom he becomes intimately acquainted is as real as the next person, but no-one else can see or experience her. Jinns feature in the Quran and are embedded in Omani folklore and they can appear for all kinds of reasons. He names her Prudence.

The next person we meet in the second section is Thea who has taken a post in Iraq in the same period at the time of the Iran-Iraq war and despite the terrible circumstances she feels quite at home in Baghdad. She is tempted into a relationship with Sachiv but works on resisting a passion that is clearly burgeoning but largely unacknowledged between the two of them.

Parts three and four are set early 21st Century when Gabriel, now Jabril, and Thea meet and he is convinced that she is Prudence, the jinaya of his dreams. For him, of course Prudence has never been a dream but a reality that has sustained him for the last 25 years or so.

The first two parts work wonderfully, the writer is a very talented storyteller. The last two sections however, I felt, didn’t hold together quite as well as the first half. The characters began to richly develop early on but then lost a bit of credibility as Gabriel and Thea began to wrestle with the phenomenon of the jinn. There are, however, layers in the book that make it feel lucid and full of life and the writing is excellent.

I read this book whilst in The Empty Quarter, where some of the book is set and that made it a wonderful experience. Having just climbed several sand dunes I was intrigued to find the two of them camping out in the desert, which actually is a dangerous place. The Empty Quarter is an area of pure desert, larger than France, with more sand than the Sahara, which is 15x larger (according to the novel). In the novel there are pertinent mentions of Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands as he travelled through The Empty Quarter in the company of a Bedouin Tribe. He recorded how the dunes constantly shift and get reshaped by the winds and can move up to half a metre per day. Fascinating if you are actually watching this happen in front of your eyes!

The author talked to TripFiction about writing and location, do head over to our website; and if ever you need inspiration to visit a country, then this novel is excellent in terms of TripFiction and a good read. Oman should be firmly on your to-visit list!

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