Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad: Historical Fiction by Edward Parr PreOrder Tour with Guest Post & Giveaway

 

TAMANRASSET
Edward Parr

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GENRE:  Historical Fiction

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BLURB:

TAMANRASSET is historical fiction set on the edge of the Sahara as the ancient world begins to fade and great empires collide. Four strangers—a mature Foreign Legionnaire, a Sharif’s wrathful son, an ambitious American archaeologist, and an abandoned Swedish widow—become adrift and isolated, but when their paths intersect, the fragile connections between them tell a story of survival and fate on the edge of the abyss. Blending the sweep of classic adventure with the horror of a great historical calamities, Edward Parr’s TAMANRASSET is a saga about the crossroads where nomads meet.

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EXCERPT

The Basilica of Douïmès was quite a lovely site (and fairly peaceful considering the dozen native workmen who were lazily taking measurements and digging pilot holes at Ren’s direction) yet it was not a place for great discoveries. Ren thought about the Byzantine necropolis behind the basilica which seemed such a promising site; unfortunately, Père Delattre had reserved it for his own excavations. Ren wondered how much it would cost to drain the flooded marsh in the Salammbô district nearby where the Temple of Tanit was rumored to be located. As he walked about and reviewed the work of the diggers, Ren became increasingly irritated. Ordinarily, he thought, the Tunisian diggers preferred to do anything but work–they showed a greater interest than the professors in the minutest fragment of pottery and would stand around listening in awe to an academic discussion of a thing they’d never heard of before. Their picks moved with a balletic slowness of motion intended to keep even the most delicate relic safe from harm. Ren had to remind himself again that he was lucky to have earned this position: He had no surviving family, his father had been no one of importance, he had been raised on money left for him in trust. He was lucky to have ended up in England after being orphaned, lucky to have worked with Petrie in Egypt, and lucky to be in Carthage. Nevertheless, he chafed at Delattre’s pedantry and the slow pace of the work.

© 2025 by Edward Parr and Edwardian Press (New Orleans, Louisiana)

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Guest Post:

Edward Parr’s Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad Setting the Stage for my New Novel: Maghreb at the Turn of the Century At the start of the 20th century, the nations of the Maghreb (chiefly Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) were under pressure from European powers. These three states had all once been part of the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, but they had become separated and largely independent nations. France had begun to colonize Algeria in the 1830s and had vigorously suppressed rebellion by the local, predominantly Muslim, inhabitants in the northern coastal part of the country, but its control south into the Saharan Algeria was inconsistent. France had also established a “protectorate” over Tunisia in 1881 to put an end to the piracy in the Mediterranean that was based there. Only Morocco remained formally independent, ruled by a Sultan named Abd al-Aziz who was under intense diplomatic, economic, and military pressure, chiefly from France and Spain. Morocco was internally unstable: the central government (call the “Makhzen”) faced financial difficulties, regional rebellions, challenges in enforcing authority in remote areas, and frustration among local tribes and religious scholars. The Sultan sought to modernize his country but lacked resources and suffered from dependency on foreign loans and business concessions. In the southeastern parts of Morocco where the border with Algeria was poorly defined, independent local tribes battled French soldiers sent to preserve peace. Around 1904 to 1905, the rivalry between France (seeking to consolidate its influence in the region) and Germany (seeking to block France and assert its own interests) grew heated. A crisis peaked with a visit by the German Kaiser to Tangier in 1905. Rather than leading to war, it led to the Algeciras Conference in 1906 which formalized European oversight of Morocco’s finances, policing, and trade. While Morocco retained nominal independence, real power passed to foreign powers. Sultan Abd al-Aziz was weakened politically and lost legitimacy in the eyes of his people. In 1907, France used incidents of violence against Europeans in Morocco to bombard the city of Casablanca killing thousands and to justify military occupation of Casablanca and the city of Oujda on Morocco’s eastern border. These interventions further humiliated Moroccan sovereignty and alarmed both elites and religious authorities who shifted their support toward the Sultan’s brother, Abd al-Hafid. The final turning point came with the Battle of Marrakesh: Abd al-Hafid’s forces defeated the Sultan’s, and Abd al-Hafid took effective power. Thus, by late 1908, Morocco had a new ruler, but one whose grip on power was contested, whose legitimacy was conditional, and whose ability to resist foreign influence was constrained. Thus, the stage was set for further colonial encroachment. In my novel Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad, the lives of four protagonists become entwined in the Maghreb of the early 20th century: One is a mature Foreign Legionnaire who has made his home in the harsh life of France’s desert fortresses on the border with Morocco; the second is the young Arab son of the Sharif that leads the tribes in the western Sahara fighting to protect his family from the French; third is an ambitious American archeologist in charge of the excavations at Carthage in Tunisia; and the last is a young Swedish widow in Fez who adopts Islam in order to earn a place in the community there. It is only through the intersection of their lives that they become bound together and influence a world that stands on the brink of vanishing forever.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Edward (“Ted”) Parr studied playwriting at New York University in the 1980’s, worked with artists Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and staged his own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. He published his Kingdoms Fall trilogy of World War One espionage adventure novels which were collectively awarded Best First Novel and Best Historical Fiction Novel by Literary Classics in 2016. He has always had a strong interest in expanding narrative forms, and in his novel writing, he explores older genres of fiction (like the pulp fiction French Foreign Legion adventures or early espionage fiction) as inspiration to examine historical periods of transformation. His main writing inspirations are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bernard Cornwell, Georges Surdez, and Patrick O’Brien.

Socials:

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Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tamanrasset-edward-parr/1148255148

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GIVEAWAY

One randomly chosen winner will win a $25 Amazon/BN.com gift card.

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