The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A captivating debut that imagines a passionate friendship between Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert when they were exploring the Nile in 1849.
Before she became the nineteenth-century's heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled up the Nile at the same time. In reality, they never met. But in The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they ignite a friendship marked by intelligence, humour, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies.
On the surface, Nightingale and Flaubert have little in common. She is a woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men. He is a notorious womanizer, involved with innumerable prostitutes. But both are at painful crossroads in their lives and burn with unfulfilled ambition. In Shomer's deft hands, the two unlikely soulmates come together to share their darkest torments and fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travellers, this mesmerizing debut novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it coloured by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth century Egypt.
'A tour de force of twenty-first century storytelling' Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales
'Immensely satisfying ... deftly imagined' Susanna Moore, author ofThe Big Girls
'The Twelve Rooms of the Nilepromises ... heat and mud aplenty in an atmospheric imagining of the friendship that grew between Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert on their 1849 Nile journey' - Sunday Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut novel, poet/storywriter Shomer (Tourist Season) imagines Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale meeting in Egypt, among the crowds cruising the Nile. This is 1850, before Madame Bovary was written or Nightingale famously tended to the wounded in the Crimean War. Shomer portrays the Frenchman and the Englishwoman as seemingly having little in common: he frequents brothels, makes squeezes (tracings) of monuments, and copes with the failure of his early fiction by writing pornography. She travels with chaperones, reads hieroglyphics, and sleeps under a newfangled contraption to keep mosquitoes at bay. Sharing itineraries, the two discover they both possess unquenchable ambition, and they both suffer from depression over the gap between dreams and reality. Mutual respect begets attraction, and soon Nightingale is teaching Flaubert how women think, while Flaubert teaches Nightingale how men feel. Poetically evoked, Egypt proves as multidimensional and conflicted as the main characters, while Nightingale's maid provides humor and pathos. Narrative drama is not Shomer's forte, but she makes up for the meandering pace with rich landscapes, probing character studies, and well described insights into inspiration and genius.
