Books like Desert
Two stories braided together: the Blue Men of the Sahara driven north by French colonial troops in 1909 and 1910, and Lalla, a girl descended from them, growing up decades later in a shantytown on the Moroccan coast.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Desert
Onitsha
In 1948, twelve-year-old Fintan sails with his Italian mother from France to join the English father he has never met in Onitsha, a trading town on the Niger.
Wandering Star
Esther, a Jewish girl hiding with her mother in a mountain village in the south of France in 1943, sets out after the war for Palestine, where her path briefly crosses that of Nejma, a Palestinian girl bound for a refugee camp.
Desertion
In 1899 an Englishman, Martin Pearce, stumbles out of the desert into a small town on the East African coast, is nursed back to health by a shopkeeper's family, and falls in love with the shopkeeper's sister.
God's Bits of Wood
In 1947 and 1948 the African workers on the Dakar to Niger railway go on strike against their French employers, and the women of their towns hold the strike together.
Martha Quest
Martha Quest, a restless, bookish girl on a farm in British Central Africa in the 1930s, leaves for the colonial town to find a life of her own.
Exile and the Kingdom
Six stories of exile, among them a French schoolteacher on an Algerian plateau told to deliver an Arab prisoner to the police, and a wife who slips out of her bed at night into the desert.
Solar Storms
Angela Jensen, seventeen, scarred and raised in foster homes, comes back to the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada to find the women of her family, as a dam project threatens their land.
A General Theory of Oblivion
Ludo, an agoraphobic Portuguese woman in Luanda, bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence in 1975 and lives there alone for nearly thirty years.
Cities of Salt
In a desert oasis in an unnamed Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, Americans arrive looking for oil, and the oasis, its people and their way of life are swept away.
The Shadow King
In 1935, as Mussolini's army invades Ethiopia, Hirut, an orphaned servant girl, joins the women who fight, and helps disguise a peasant as the emperor Haile Selassie.
Men in the Sun
Three Palestinian refugees of different ages pay a smuggler to get them across the desert from Basra to Kuwait inside the empty tank of a water truck.
Moon Palace
In 1969, Columbia student Marco Stanley Fogg inherits his late uncle's library, reads and sells it book by book until he is starving in Central Park, and a job as companion to a rich, blind, cantankerous old man named Thomas Effing leads him to his own family's secrets.