Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy & sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. Travelling through Morocco & Algeria she eats pigeon pie with a family of cannabis farmers, & learns about the habits of djinns; she encounters citizens whose protest against the tyrannical King Hassan takes the form of attaching colanders to their television aerials
- a practice he soon outlaws
- & comes across a stone-age method of making olive-oil, still going strong. She allows a ten-year-old to lead her into the fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers
- where she makes a good friend. Plunging southwards, regardless, into the desert, she at last shares a lunch of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her old friends, in a green & pleasant palm grove perfumed by flowering henna: once, it seems, the favourite scent of the Prophet Mohammed. She discovers at journey`s end that life in a date-farming oasis, haunting though its songs may be, is not so simple & uncomplicated as she has imagined. Annie Hawes has legions of fans. Her writing has the well-built flow of fiction & the self-effacing honesty of a journal.