Into Suez (Paperback)

Description

Making connections between the Suez Canal War in 1949 and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this novel about a British couple's disastrous marriage is told by their daughter, who has discovered her mother's diary written at the end of World War II. Ailsa Roberts, the writer of the diary, shows herself to be a vivid and intelligent young Englishwoman who is sailing with her little daughter on the Empire Glory to join her husband, a Welsh RAF sergeant stationed in Egypt, where Britain still occupies the Suez Canal Zone. On the voyage, however, Ailsa falls for Mona, an officer’s exotic wife. When the women finally disembark in Suez, they face a tumultuous world of casual British racism. Joe Roberts, Ailsa's young working-class husband, believes he is acting honorably when he tries to end his wife's friendship with Mona, but instead sets off a series of devastating consequences.

About the Author

Stevie Davies is the director of creative writing at Swansea University. She is also the author of Boy Blue, winner of the Fawcett Society Book Prize; Closing the Book, long-listed for the Booker Prize; and The Element of Water, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award. Two of Davies's novels have been adapted for radio and television, and the film rights to her novel Kith and Kin have been purchased.

Praise For…

"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

"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 realized fusion of her personal and political histories to date."  —Guardian Review

"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 realized fusion of her personal and political histories to date."  —Guardian Review