Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

PICTURE IN THE SAND

Peter Blauner

Peter Blauner's epic PICTURE IN THE SAND is a sweeping intergenerational saga about family, faith, and the enduring power of storytelling.

In this historical suspense novel, spanning 60 years and 6000 miles, Ali Hassan, an Egyptian-American grandfather in Brooklyn, reveals a secret past of activism and heartbreak in an attempt to keep his hot-headed young grandson from making the greatest mistake of his life. In a journey that takes readers from the high-wattage glamour of a legendary 1950s film - Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments - to the deserts of Cairo, Ali describes how he landed a dream job as DeMille's personal assistant, and then found himself enmeshed in events that changed the course of history. It's a tale of physical danger, moral quicksand, and romantic entanglements that Ali has kept hidden most of his life. But now there's an urgent reason to share it: his beloved American grandson has run off to become a holy warrior. And it's up to his grandfather to rescue him, because Ali knows how this movie can end. Twenty years in the making, this is a story of how one family dances to echoes of history and ultimately, moves toward redemption. Peter Blauner is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including Slow Motion Riot, The Intruder, Proving Ground and Sunrise Highway. He served as co-executive producer of the CBS show, Blue Bloods.

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Book Published 2023-01-03 by Minotaur Books / St. Martin's Press

Comments

Blauner's epic is a triumph, a story within a story, and a Bible story within a movie. It manages to meld a clear-eyed view of modern-day terrorism with the incredible true life history behind the making of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in Egypt. His characters rise from these pages not as the types they could be in lesser hands, but as individuals - flawed, irreducible, doomed by their historical time and limited consciousness - all too human. In the end, Picture in the Sand looks at the mess in front of us and behind us, and affirms, like Scheherazade, that stories can save us.

(...) breath-taking page turning novel. (...) pressure cooker plot (...) a fast and absorbing read that will make you yearn for a Cairo you never knew you missed.

With the magic only the finest storytellers can summon, Peter Blauner has conjured a tale where epic reality - the making of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments - is woven into a story of adventure, suspense, mystery, love, sorrow, assassination plots, prison breaks, and deep appreciation for the movies. Ali Hassan is an unassuming hero who unspools his life story in an attempt to save his grandson from falling into a pit of fanatic extremism. You'll meet real people and living history under Egypt's baking sun as Ali careens from one danger to the next, a mid-century Thief of Baghdad who meets each setback with honest courage (and a sharp sense of humor). I found this impossible to put down. On rare occasions I read a book that reminds me of why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place. This is such a book, an authentic tour de force, the kind you lay aside to read again.

This is historical fiction at its absolute best - heartfelt, anchored in real events, and extremely well told. Read more...

...a shrewd and impressively detailed novel. Even though Picture in the Sand technically is fiction, the book was more intensively researched than many nonfiction works and emerges as a shrewd and revelatory portrait of an enormous American movie being made on location at a time of major intrigue and tumult in the Middle East. Read more...

Arabic: Ninawa ; Bulgaria: Enthusiast ; French: HarperCollins France

...Ali's story powerfully illustrates the intensity of a young man's yearning to be part of a larger cause and the dangerous paths of espionage, assassination, and betrayal it threatens to lead him down. Blauner's resolution, however, offers welcome hope for redemption.

Sweeping, enthralling, well-written, PICTURE IN THE SAND is a mesmerizing book... I loved the classic noir atmosphere, the exotic setting, the most endearing hero. I don't think we read enough books about the history of this fascinating country that is Egypt, and this one does it with such grace, I marveled at every page.

...great storytelling, a coming-of-age tale with a love story at its heart... an inspired idea skillfully executed. A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.

Enchanting... a cautionary tale and a mesmerising tour of Egypt in the tumultous 1950s. Read more...