Rosemary Sutcliff, illustrious children's author, breaks a long silence as an adult novelist with a fast flowing and immensely moving tale of the Ottoman empire.
It starts in the Egyptian campaign of the Napoleonic Wars and is based on the true story of Private Thomas Keith of the 78th Highlanders who is taken prisoner in 1807 at El Hamed, eventually converts to Islam, and rises to become Emir of the holy city of Medina.
It is a story of the bond forged between the former gunsmith's apprentice from Edinburgh and Tussun Bey, the spoilt younger son of the Turkish Viceroy of Egypt, Muhammed Ali, a chivalrous brotherhood in arms which knows it can call for the ultimate sacrifice.
Across a beautifully visualised desert canvas, Rosemary Sutcliff brings to life, and to death, the violent battles and tactical manoeuvering of the desert campaigns to reclaim the holy places of Islam. And alongside the fast and furious action, we see Thomas's love for Anoud, the girl he rescues from the sacked city of Medina.
As in her earlier novels, of Arthurian Britain (Sword at Sunset), and classical Greece (The Flowers of Adonis), Rosemary Sutcliff builds a totally convincing picture of a society as subtle as it is barbaric, a world Thomas Keith espouses as his own, accepting its religion and its customs, from the dignified simplicity of the Bedouin camp, to the scheming scented antechambers of the Viceroy's palace in Cairo. Blood and Sand is a welcome return of a justly acclaimed author who writes to rarely for adult readers.
—from the dust jacket
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