Picture in the Sand
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"On rare occasions I read a book that reminds me of why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place. This is such a book." —Stephen King
Peter Blauner's epic Picture in the Sand is a sweeping intergenerational saga told through a grandfather's passionate letters to his grandson, passing on the story of his political rebellion in 1950s Egypt in order to save his grandson's life in a post-9/11 world.
When Alex Hassan gets accepted to an Ivy League university, his middle-class Egyptian-American family is filled with pride and excitement. But that joy turns to shock when they discover that he’s run off to the Middle East to join a holy war instead. When he refuses to communicate with everyone else, his loving grandfather Ali emails him one last plea. If Alex will stay in touch, his grandfather will share with Alex – and only Alex – a manuscript containing the secret story of his own life that he’s kept hidden from his family, until now.
It's the tale of his romantic and heartbreaking past rooted in Hollywood and the post-revolutionary Egypt of the 1950s, when young Ali was a movie fanatic who attained a dream job working for the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille on the set of his epic film, The Ten Commandments. But Ali’s vision of a golden future as an American movie mogul gets upended when he is unwittingly caught up in a web of politics, espionage, and real-life events that change the course of history.
It's a narrative he’s told no one for more than a half-century. But now he’s forced to unearth the past to save a young man who’s about to make the same tragic mistakes he made so long ago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1954 Egypt, the long-shot dream of a career in Hollywood for young Ali Hassan, the protagonist of this outstanding thriller from Blauner (Slow Motion Riot), seems on the cusp of realization. Legendary film director Cecil B. DeMille has arrived with his cast and crew to shoot scenes for his epic, The Ten Commandments, and has hired Ali as an assistant. The country has just fallen under the control of secularist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and when the Muslim Brotherhood targets DeMille's production as a means to discredit the new regime, Ali is swept up in the resultant intrigue and violence. Entangled in Nasser's crackdown, he spends the next 17 years in prison. Blauner tells this suspenseful story within the narrative framework of e-mails exchanged between Ali, now an old man in poor health, and his grandson, Alex, who has left their home in the United States to join modern-day Middle Eastern terrorists. Ali offers his own life story as an attempt to persuade his grandson against making the same mistakes he did at that age. This is historical fiction at its absolute best—heartfelt, anchored in real events, and extremely well told.
