Welsh born Stevie Davies is a novelist, literary critic, biographer and historian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Academi Gymreig and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Swansea.

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.

Pictures of the Swansea launch of 'Into Suez'

 

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

 

 

WRITING THE EYRIE: LIVING IN THE HOUSE OF MEMORY by Stevie Davies
An essay dedicated to the memory of Frank Regan