A Café on the Nile
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- €3.49
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- €3.49
Publisher Description
A grand historical novel of romance and high adventure that roils in cosmopolitan Cairo and sprawls across the highlands of East Africa.
A Café on the Nile
It is 1935 in East Africa. Mussolini's armies are streaming by the hundreds of thousands through Suez on a march to Ethiopia. In the desert the Italian Air Force, equipped with bombs and poison gas, prepares for invasion. Abyssinia sits on the edge of a nightmare that will alter modern history, while safaris in the African highlands cater to the excesses of the wealthy and disenchanted. And in Cairo, on the Nile, the cosmopolitan crowd gathers at the Cataract Café to gamble with destiny.
All paths cross at the Cataract Café. There, with a single word, a simple gesture, an extravagant gift, alliances are drawn, deals made, and fates unwittingly determined for the memorable cast of characters that people this tale of high adventure. There professional hunter Anton Rider's Gypsy blood runs cold when he spies his estranged wife, Gwenn, with her lover, the Italian count and aviator Lorenzo Grimaldi. There the spoiled, rich American twins from Lexington, Bernadette and Harriet Mills, contract Rider for an ill-fated safari across East Africa with Ernst von Decken, a German freebooter who has stolen a fortune in silver from the Italian army. There Olivio Alavedo, the Goan proprietor of the Cataract Café, celebrates the fifty years that have blessed him with the friendship of the down-at-the-heel English lord Adam Penfold, with a good wife, six daughters, an exotic mistress, and useful political connections. A dwarf, Olivio also suffers his age and knows he won’t see fifty-five. But no one knows just how dangerously the days are numbered at the Cataract Café.
Praise for Bartle Bull
“You finish this book almost out of breath . . . appreciative of Mr. Bull’s spirited, sensuous, hot-blooded evocation of a rich and eventful
historical world.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“A rip-roaring yarn . . . chock-full of fine ingredients: a cupful
of Casablanca, a dollop of Isak Dinesen, a pinch of Indiana Jones
and a touch of Tender Is the Night. Bull enriches the mix with a
white-hot plot and genuinely dashing descriptive writing.” —USA Today
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bull, an explorer who turned his extensive knowledge of Africa to excellent use in The White Rhino Hotel, has produced another rattling good blockbuster yarn. The description seems inevitable, because this is very much a period piece--the period being 1935 (a few years before The English Patient takes place), when Mussolini was flexing his military muscle in Africa and pouring men and munitions through the Suez Canal for the conquest of Abyssinia, in one of the harsh prologues to WWII. The large and spirited cast includes Olivio Alavedo, the wily Goan dwarf who runs the Cataract Cafe on a barge in Cairo; his friend Anton Rider (a British great white hunter raised in England by gypsies), whose long absences on safari have spoiled his marriage to plucky Gwenn. She, alas, takes up with a suave but untrustworthy Italian flying ace, Count Grimaldi, and soon finds herself, when the attack on Abyssinia begins, trying to patch up the natives his planes are massacring. Other characters include a pair of sexy, sharp-shooting American female twins on Anton's war-beleaguered safari, a grizzled German adventurer attempting to make off with Italian silver booty and a delightfully languid British aristocrat, Adam Penfold, who seems to know everyone. The action is nonstop, the details are rawly authentic and the whole thing makes for a fast-paced and absorbing, if somewhat old-fashioned, read. The only problem is that Bull seems to take rather excessive relish in the many imaginatively brutish ways in which men kill each other.
