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Peter Blauner's epic Picture in the Sand is a sweeping intergenerational saga told through a grandfather's passionate letters to his grandson, passing on the story of his political rebellion in 1950s Egypt in order to save his grandson's life in a post-9/11 world.
When Alex Hassan gets accepted to an Ivy League university, his middle-class Egyptian-American family is filled with pride and excitement. But that joy turns to shock when they discover that he's run off to the Middle East to join a holy war instead. When he refuses to communicate with everyone else, his loving grandfather Ali emails him one last plea. If Alex will stay in touch, his grandfather will share with Alex – and only Alex – a manuscript containing the secret story of his own life that he's kept hidden from his family, until now.
It's the tale of his romantic and heartbreaking past rooted in Hollywood and the post-revolutionary Egypt of the 1950s, when young Ali was a movie fanatic who attained a dream job working for the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille on the set of his epic film, The Ten Commandments. But Ali's vision of a golden future as an American movie mogul gets upended when he is unwittingly caught up in a web of politics, espionage, and real-life events that change the course of history.
It's a narrative he's told no one for more than a half-century. But now he's forced to unearth the past to save a young man who's about to make the same tragic mistakes he made so long ago.
"This is historical fiction at its absolute best―heartfelt, anchored in real events, and extremely well told." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Great storytelling, a coming-of-age tale with a love story at its heart.... All in all, an inspired idea skillfully executed." - Kirkus Reviews
"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." - Stephen King
"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." - David Duchovny
"A richly imagined, propulsive and timely novel about the intersection of Western hubris and Middle Eastern reality...vividly drawn." - Marisa Silver
This information about Picture in the Sand was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Parmelee
Peter Blauner is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author whose novels include Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder. He spent the 1980s covering crime, politics and other forms of socially-abhorrent behavior for New York magazine. For the past decade he has been working in television, writing for several shows in the Law & Order franchise and the CBS show Blue Bloods. He was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
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