The Hawk of Egypt by Joan Conquest

Description

Joan Conquest, a bestselling author of Anglo-Egyptian romance, wrote The Hawk of Egypt out of the country she knew from the inside: its light, its faith, its mingled streets and its deep silences. The novel opens at the moment the call to prayer rings across the golden sky — “allahu akbar—la ilaha—illa ‘llah!” — as Damaris, an English girl, turns into the narrow street with her bulldog Wellington striding behind her. From the first page the book is saturated in the Egypt of the early twentieth century: the bazaars, the ancient rituals, the desert stretching beyond the city as a country of its own.

The hawk of the title is the compelling, dangerous man whose path crosses Damaris on that first street — a figure of power and secrecy, part European, part Oriental, whose motives the reader, like the heroine, must learn to read. Their love runs against every current of tribe, creed, and colonial expectation, and Conquest stages it against a sequence of extraordinary set pieces: desert nights, feasts, plots, and the slow, terrifying revelation of what the hawk really is.

Conquest’s prose is vividly colored and frankly theatrical, and her sympathy for her Egyptian characters — rare and rather radical for its time — gives the romance a heat and a conscience that the genre usually skimped on. The result is a story that flatters neither side of its world and burns anyway.

Why readers pick it up

• An atmospheric turn-of-the-century Cairo rendered with real intimacy.
• A heroine with spirit and a hero with genuine moral depth.
• Desert-romance conventions raised by a writer who knew her territory.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.