Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad

Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad is a novel set at the beginning of the 20th Century on the fringes of the Sahara, when the people living on the edges of the desert did not know what was out there and when European nations were only the most recent world powers to exploit the region. It's the story of how four lives become entwined: A mature Foreign Legionnaire who has made his home in the harsh life of France's desert fortresses; the young Arab son of the Sharif that leads the tribes in the western Sahara fighting to protect his family; an ambitious American archeologist in charge of the excavations at Carthage; and a young Swedish widow in Fez who adopts Islam in order to earn a place for herself there. Each of them suffers a crisis which isolates them from their community, and it is only through the chance intersection of their lives that they become bound together and eventually influence a world that stands on the brink of extinction. Like his prior novels, particularly his trilogy of World War I adventures based on early espionage fiction, Edward Parr's Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad recalls the classic pulp fiction adventures of the French Foreign Legion while telling a new story that takes place against a backdrop of real historical events in Morocco and Algeria in the years 1900 to 1908. It's is a novel about loss and alienation and the fragile, often transitory bonds that tie people together.