Celia Jeffries is a writer, editor, and teacher.
Her award-winning debut novel, BLUE DESERT,
is now available as an audio book from Tantor Media
Blue Desert
Blue Desert is the story of Alice George, a headstrong young British woman, and her life among the Tuareg, a tribe of nomadic warriors. While the outside world faced the catastrophe of World War I, the Tuareg continued to crisscross the Sahara as they always had. A matrilineal society in which the men are veiled and the women hold property—a world in which anything can happen—it was a world well suited to eighteen-year-old Alice, who discovers a life she could never live in corseted England.
In 1917, Alice returns home to a world completely alien to the one she had left seven years before. Her silence about her life in the Sahara is finally broken five decades later when she receives a telegram announcing Abu has died in the desert. “Who is Abu?” her husband asks. “My lover,” she replies. Thus begins a weeklong journey of revelation as Alice lays bare her secrets.
What People Are Saying
Blue Desert is unflinchingly adventurous, unashamedly feminist, deeply human and thoughtful. Jeffries seamlessly weaves two narratives: eighteen-year-old Alice with the Tuareg tribe in wartime Sahara and seventy-eight-year-old Alice in London—to a compelling conclusion without sacrificing the lyricism of her prose, lush grounding in the natural world, or the heartbreaking complexity of her characters.
— Ellen Meeropol, author of Her Sister’s Tattoo
Blue Desert will sweep you up in an astounding modern odyssey as Alice transports us between Northern Africa and England, between childhood and old age, between the riveting external world and its secret internal workings. With sensual detail and stunningly apt metaphors, Jeffries blurs the boundaries of countries, of violence and desire, suffering and compassion, art and reality, until we’re spellbound, aching with the narrator to reach home, but only as she defines it. Alice’s Ithaca is no geographic place. It is the landscape of love: complex, deeply tuned and spanning worlds, a passage home you will never forget.
—Chris Jacox, author of Bears Dancing in the Northern Air, Yale Younger Poets’ Series
Crossing continents, cultures, and history, this story of one woman’s ordeal and renewal is filled with hope and generosity. Alice is a remarkable character whose bravery and determination are as much a part of her survival as her expansive heart, curiosity, and capacity for forgiveness. “The desert is a palace of winds. A palace of space,” Alice recalls about her years away from home. The same can be said of Blue Desert, an exquisite, expansive, and transporting novel.
—Hester Kaplan, author of The Tell
A good novel transports us to another place and time. A great novel makes us wish that the book would never end. I desperately did not want Blue Desert to end. Celia Jeffries has written a stunning book.
—Jacqueline Sheehan, New York Times bestselling author
In sumptuously detailed prose, Celia Jeffries weaves a fascinating, troubling tale of cultures colliding. She lures us deep into the desert, deep into the past, and deep into her imagination. A wild, gripping story, well told!
—Debra Immergut, author of Captives and You, Again
Page after surprising page, Celia Jeffries carefully metes out clues to the puzzle of Alice’s extraordinary life, from London to the Sahara Desert and back again. Blue Desert is a mesmerizing and unforgettable story. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop.
—Ellen Wittlinger, author of Someone Else’s Shoes
About the Book
Who are the Tuareg?
The Tuareg once controlled the caravan routes across the Sahara, moving goods through an environment both breathtakingly beautiful and historically hostile. When European countries began colonizing Africa in the nineteenth century, the Tuareg dealt with French attempts to rule the desert, the eventual imposition of borders in the Sahara and then devastating droughts, all of which forced them to transform their way of life in the twentieth century.
The Blue Men
An indigo-dyed cotton, sometimes ten meters in length, is used as a veil and turban by Tuareg tribes in the Sahara. The material protects them from wind-borne sand and the indigo that rubs off from the material is believed to protect the skin. Because the dye can permeate the skin of the wearer, the Tuareg are often referred to as the “blue men of the desert.”
For information about how “the Blue Men’ have influenced fashion, see: www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210927-the-blue-men-of-the-sahara
A Matrilineal Society
In the fourth century Tin Hinan is said to have travelled south from modern day Morocco to what would one day become Algeria, where she became the first queen of the Tuaregs. Every noble family is said to descend from Tin Hinan, whose name translates as ‘she of the tents.’ Integral to the Tuareg way of life are customs that would be considered progressive even today. Women are property owners and are allowed as much freedom as men.
For information about a documentary that includes the Tuareg matriarchy: www.matriarch.world
