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INTO SUEZ
The year is 1949: Great Britain, victorious
but bankrupt after WWII, attempts to reassert itself as an
Imperial power by its military presence in the Suez Canal
zone. Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers has some
implicit truths to tell about the recent invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan. When Israel declares its statehood and drives
out the Arab population, Joe, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa
and daughter Nia leave Wales for Egypt.
Joe is the everyday working man, in whom
racism and misogyny become a sickness. Alisa, an independent,
free thinking woman, yearns to explore her new homeland of
Egypt. It's here that she meets the exotic Mona, who opens
Ailsa's eyes to what lies beyond the horizon. In a world of
terrorism and political struggle, her friendship with Mona
and an act of murder pitch the happily married couple into
tragedy.
Nia, looking back in late middle age, follows
in her parents' wake to sail the Suez Canal. On this journey
Nia will face difficult life lessons about love and betrayal.
ISBN 978-1-906998-00-4
Price £11.99
Paperback 448 pages 216 x 138 mm
Published 08 March 2010
Into Suez is Hay Festival
Book of the Month and Waterstones.com Book of the Month
Stevie Davies’s Into Suez (Parthian, £11.99),
which I’ve just finished, is a bold and gripping novel on an important subject, with a beautifully
handled double time frame, and some of Davies’s best prose yet. She writes so well about childhood,
landscape, class, British social attitudes and Arab realities. The careful research never intrudes and
always rings true. Her characters are rounded in time, grounded in place. A very satisfying and moving
book. Margaret Drabble, The Telegraph 15 July 2010
Davies writes with an intensity which is simultaneously disturbing and exhilarating;
her prose has a marvellous lyricism whether she is describing the heat of Ismailia or the rain in Wales:
Times Literary Supplement
Stevie Davies is one of our most consistent
and continually undervalued writers whose unsentimental, quietly
revelatory novels have cropped up on the Booker and Orange
shortlists without ever quite converting to a major prize.
Into Suez, her 11th novel, deserves to be the one that brings
wider renown, as it presents the most fully realised fusion
of her personal and political histories to date: Guardian
Review
An astonishing piece of writing, and
writing a review is going to be like scrawling “77 per
cent, well done” at the bottom of a manuscript of A
la recherche du temps perdu ... a rich, subtle, intricate
novel, writing with a type of imaginative power that is capable
of transporting the reader into a world that is at once very
far away and still very close: Planet: the Welsh Internationalist
A harrowing tale of imperial brutality
and forbidden love in the Suez Canal Zone during the run-up
to Britain's ignominious expulsion from Egypt in 1956: Independent
A compelling human and political drama
... Beautifully observed characterisation and an engrossing
plot make Into Suez a highly satisfying read: What’s
On in Swansea?
A deeply felt novel that manages to combine
in a masterly synthesis, political history and the way that
it moulds and warps the lives of human beings: The
Warwick Review
Read the full
Warwick Review article here. |
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Pictures
of the Swansea launch of 'Into Suez' |
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The
Eyrie
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK |
In The Eyrie Stevie
has created an unforgettable character in the figure of ‘Red
Dora’, the 92-year-old Socialist veteran of the Spanish Civil
War. Set in Oystermouth, the novel, which asks profound questions
about the modern world, is alive with humour, pathos and beauty.
The novel is the first part of her two-book contract
with Weidenfeld: Stevie has lately returned from Egypt, where she
was researching the second book, the epic novel, Into Suez, set
in the 1950s in the run-up to the Suez invasion - to be published
by Weidenfeld in 2009.
AL Kennedy 3rd February 2007 The Guardian:
"Davies just writes, very precisely, sometimes wonderfully
- sometimes fiction, sometimes non-fiction - and always from the
heart. She does what a writer does - making beauty for strangers,
passing it on."
Read
AL Kennedy's review of The Eyrie
Murrough O’Brien in the Independent
on Sunday:
‘It is deeply joyful, and magically written, as full of sea
swell as of rasping barnacles.’
Nicolette Jones in the Independent:
'Davies has a tantalising way of writing glancingly about the important
developments, leaving the reader eager to know what happened. Meanwhile
inconsequentialities, lightly handled in conversational prose and
varied voices, accrete like mineral deposits, until they make something
substantial and solid. Enjoy at leisure.'
Saga Magazine:
'Davies deals sensitively but unsentimentally with lives less ordinary
than they seem, writing with warmth and wit, with and against the
currents of modern living.'
The Sunday Times 25 February 2007:
‘Deftly mapping the [characters’] interactions, and
the unwelcome infractions of the outside world, Davies’s novel
exhibits an agile wit, an intuitive understanding of human nature,
and an unsentimental clarity in its personalising of the political.’
Daily Telegraph 24 February 2007:
'...acute and compassionate observations.'
The Guardian 1 March 2008:
'That this is one of the fiercest books I have read in
years. It is about love, about politics, about the consolations
that only strangers can offer and is made all the more striking
in that it centres on a nonagenarian, Dora, in the final years of
her life. Vain, hawk-like Dora, a former communist and veteran of
the International Brigades, has no intention of going gently into
that good night. She takes lessons in computer hacking and exerts
a benign despotism over the other inhabitants of the Eyrie, a converted
mansion on the Swansea coast that is refuge to an almost uniformly
charming collection of lost souls. Cosy Welsh Eirlys, always ready
to mop up tears and ply her neighbours with a slice of bara brith,
is not nearly as comfortable as she seems, while young Hannah, an
engineer in search of her father, finds herself instead becoming
Dora's surrogate child, an act of replacement that helps Dora to
finally accept the death of her own wild daughter, lost decades
before. Davies is a meticulous, generous writer and her portrait
of a life on the brink of ending is so full of contrary, thrilling
vitality that you can practically taste the sap.'
OL
The Observer 16 March 2008:
'Quiet and intense, this is a story bereft of flash, but none the
poorer for it. Delicate, beautifully written, firmly imbued with
an unusually genuine grasp of time and place and character, only
the most hard-hearted reader will close The Eyrie without a satisfyingly
teary sigh.'
Jean Hannah Edelstein |
