Beyond The Desert

A man with no country, a city that lives by pearls, and a fleet about to erase it.Rashid is a guard to the Emir of Rawiya. Nobody knows he was once called Liam, that he was born in Ireland, and that he was fifteen years old when the English burned his village and pirates sold him into slavery on the Arabian coast.In Rawiya he has learned to keep quiet, to serve, and to ask for nothing. Then he meets Leyla, a pearl merchant's daughter, and for the first time he finds himself wanting something.Every night he has the same dream: a pearl of inestimable worth lying on the seabed, and the harder he swims towards it, the further it draws away.Then a Royal Navy frigate takes his ship. Her captain finds out where he comes from, and offers him everything he has never had: a name, money, land, an Irish wife, a home.It is the same empire that took everything from him.Beyond the Desert is a novel of sea and sand about freedom, belonging and the end of a world: the pearl divers of the Gulf, swept away first by the East India Company and then by oil. Forty-eight chapters, from the hold of a dhow to the guns on the walls of Rawiya, towards an answer that costs Rashid everything.For readers of seafaring fiction, of stories about men caught between two worlds, and of historical novels that refuse to take a side.