The Mistress of Abha: A Novel,Used

Product Description The year is 1930 and the British are in Arabia. Ivor Willoughby, a young orientalist, embarks on an ambitious quest to find his father, an officer abroad with the British Army. In all Ivor's life, Robert has returned to England only once, bedraggled and wildeyed with tales of As'ir, a land of sheikhs and whiteturbaned bandits, where he is fighting alongside Captain Lawrence and is known by the name Ullobi.After that single meeting, Robert is never heard from again. Ten years on, Ivor must find out what became of him. So he sets out on the journey of a lifetime. Traveling to Cairo to join the Locust Bureau, then circuitously to Abha, Yemen, and along the Red Sea coast, Ivor searches everywhere for clues about Ullobi, but no one appears to remember him. Or perhaps they are afraid to admit to it. Along the way Ivor hears whispers of a woman warrior called Na'ema who was once a slave. Her story seems tantalizingly connected with his father's, and Ivor finds himself in the misty heights of Ayinah looking for an Abyssinian seer who was carried on the same slave ship as Na'ema in 1914 and might unlock the mystery. From Publishers Weekly The late Newton's wan second novel (after The Two Pound Tram) combines adventure and the rise of Abdulaziz ibn Saud in prose as dry as sand. After accompanying Lawrence of Arabia in a campaign against the Turks, Robert Willoughby returns to 1918 England for a few days with his adolescent son, Ivor, before taking off and never being heard from again. Ten years later, Ivor embarks on a quest to Arabia to find out what happened to his father, and, soon after arriving in Abha, Ivor hears tales about a legendary exslave turned female warrior named Na'ema who may have a connection to his father. Ivor then travels to the seaport of Hali, and from there to the desert oasis of Khurma, where he spends several days in the company of Ferdhan bin Murzak, a prosperous slave trader who sends him on yet another quest toward discovering what happened to Robert. Unfortunately, the mystery's resolution is simultaneously tepid, melodramatic, and unsurprising. The glacially paced adventure is done in by colonial stereotypes, a narrator who stumbles forward without much volition or reflection, and overly stodgy language. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist A mans quest for the father he scarcely knows drives him to foreign lands in this historically based novel. Ivor Willoughby is just seven years old when his British army captain father leaves for the Middle East, returning home only once after eight years. Ten years later, in 1930, Ivor gets a job with the Royal Navy and heads to Arabia, the land that enchanted his father. After a dangerous sojourn to Yemen, Ivor is persuaded to adopt the Arabian way of patience, andwith information from a Turkish steamboat captain and an Arabian slave traderhe finds Etza, a former slave and seer. She provides both stories and letters from his father, revered among Arabs as Ullobi, and directs him to Naema, who became the legendary warrior sheikh. Accounts of tribal rivalries and power shifts are so dense, particularly early on, that the narrative becomes submerged, only to blossom near the close. Newton, who died earlier this year, is likely to be remembered more for his debut novel, The Two Pound Tram (2003), than for this more ponderous work. Michele Leber About the Author William Newton is a retired doctor who lives in a Jacobean manor house in Oxfordshire which he and his wife have restored. His debut novel, The Two Pound Tram, won the Sagittarius Award, was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel and sold over 60,000 copies in the UK.