Product Description
by Bartle Bull (Author)
A grand historical novel of romance and high adventure thatroils in cosmopolitan Cairo and sprawls across the highlands of East Africa.
A Caf on the Nile
It is 1935 in East Africa. Mussolini's armies are streaming by the hundreds of thousands through Suez on a march to Ethiopia. In the desert the Italian Air Force, equipped with bombs and poison gas, prepares for invasion. Abyssinia sits on the edge of a nightmare that will alter modern history, while safaris in the African highlands cater to the excesses of the wealthy and disenchanted. And in Cairo, on the Nile, the cosmopolitan crowd gathers at the Cataract Caf to gamble with destiny.
All paths cross at the Cataract Caf . There, with a single word, a simple gesture, an extravagant gift, alliances are drawn, deals made, and fates unwittingly determined for the memorable cast of characters that people this tale of high adventure. There professional hunter Anton Rider's Gypsy blood runs cold when he spies his estranged wife, Gwenn, with her lover, the Italian count and aviator Lorenzo Grimaldi. There the spoiled, rich American twins from Lexington, Bernadette and Harriet Mills, contract Rider for an ill-fated safari across East Africa with Ernst von Decken, a German freebooter who has stolen a fortune in silver from the Italian army. There Olivio Alavedo, the Goan proprietor of the Cataract Caf , celebrates the fifty years that have blessed him with the friendship of the down-at-the-heel English lord Adam Penfold, with a good wife, six daughters, an exotic mistress, and useful political connections. A dwarf, Olivio also suffers his age and knows he won't see fifty-five. But no one knows just how dangerously the days are numbered at the Cataract Caf .
Praise for Bartle Bull
"You finish this book almost out of breath . . . appreciative of Mr. Bull's spirited, sensuous, hot-blooded evocation of a rich and eventfulhistorical world." -Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
"A rip-roaring yarn . . . chock-full of fine ingredients: a cupfulof Casablanca, a dollop of Isak Dinesen, a pinch of Indiana Jonesand a touch of Tender Is the Night. Bull enriches the mix with awhite-hot plot and genuinely dashing descriptive writing." -USA Today
Author Biography
Bartle Bull was born in London and educated at Harvard University and Magdalen College, Oxford. A student of Africa for over thirty years, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Explorers Club. A former publisher of The Village Voice, Bull wrote an environmental column for the Voice and later for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure, the definitive history of the African safari.
