American Hard cover Edition
Holt Rinehart & Winston 1983
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On a
clear night in 1942 a hand grenade exploded in a Cairo
slum, killing one man instantly. That man is Stern, an
obscure gunrunner and morphine addict whose death should
be of no significance during the darkest days of the century.
In the Western Desert the Germans are advancing from victory
to victory, and Rommel's powerful Afrika Corps is threatening
to overrun Egypt and seize control of the Middle East.
Yet Allied Intelligence takes a very special interest
in Stern and in the enigma of his death, which may decide
the outcome of the entire war. More and more lies hidden
in the question: which side did he serve?
The search for
the truth about Stern leads his friend, Joe O'Sullivan
Beare, through the slums of Old Cairo to a decaying
former brothel called the Hotel Babylon. There in the
basement sits Bletchley, a spy with a shattered face
who boils tea on a hot plate. At the front desk, Ahmad,
an aging failure of a poet, mulls over the society pages
of thirty years ago while guarding a secret closet.
And with the help of a sad clown and illusionist named
Liffy, the mysterious code of Stern's life is finally
deciphered as Joe journeys into the past to uncover
the shadowy network of a lost world: the black archaeologist
Menelik, who lived in a cork-lined sarcophagus; the
immensely wealthy Crazy Cohen, patriarch of the famous
Cairo Cohens; the ancient twin sisters Big Belle and
Little Alice, who reminisce by candlelight in a fabled
houseboat on the Nile.
Nile Shadows is storytelling in the grand manner, a
novel about good and evil and their strange disguises,
about love and the mysteries of time and the tragedy
of war, a rich and magical odyssey spanning more than
a century.
" One of the
most complex and ambitious espionage stories ever written
.......The deciphering of Stern's past which reveals
him to have been an incurable idealist, plunges the
reader into a hall-of-mirrors world ....By a wave of
his storyteller's wand Whittemore turns the whole operation
into an exploration of the options for good and evil
thrown up in terrifying times" - Publishers
Weekly -
Reviews of Nile
Shadows:
Introduction
to the Old Earth Books edition by Ben Gibberd
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