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. |
