Picture in the Sand: A Novel

by Peter Blauner

Overview

"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

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250851017
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	234,251
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Peter Blauner is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of several other novels, including Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder. His books have been translated into twenty languages. Picture in the Sand is the culmination of two decades of writing and research that took him from Brooklyn to Cairo a half-dozen times. His most recent novel Sunrise Highway was published by Minotaur.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/28/2022

In 1954 Egypt, the long-shot dream of a career in Hollywood for young Ali Hassan, the protagonist of this outstanding thriller from Blauner (Slow Motion Riot), seems on the cusp of realization. Legendary film director Cecil B. DeMille has arrived with his cast and crew to shoot scenes for his epic, The Ten Commandments, and has hired Ali as an assistant. The country has just fallen under the control of secularist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and when the Muslim Brotherhood targets DeMille’s production as a means to discredit the new regime, Ali is swept up in the resultant intrigue and violence. Entangled in Nasser’s crackdown, he spends the next 17 years in prison. Blauner tells this suspenseful story within the narrative framework of e-mails exchanged between Ali, now an old man in poor health, and his grandson, Alex, who has left their home in the United States to join modern-day Middle Eastern terrorists. Ali offers his own life story as an attempt to persuade his grandson against making the same mistakes he did at that age. This is historical fiction at its absolute best—heartfelt, anchored in real events, and extremely well told. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Advance Praise for Picture in the Sand

"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

From the Publisher

2022-09-14
Political upheaval in Egypt circa 1954 threatens the location shooting of The Ten Commandments—and the life of a young local hired as Cecil B. DeMille's personal assistant.

A film buff, Ali Hassan is initially thrilled to work for DeMille, whose swan song this biblical epic proves to be. But his enthusiasm is dimmed by the director's imperious and temperamental ways. And his safety is compromised by the violent aims of the Muslim Brotherhood extremist group, which targets newly installed Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser for his anti-theocratic ways and for cozying up to the blasphemous Hollywoodians. One of the group's outspoken members is Sherif, Ali's close but combative cousin, who pressures Ali into abetting a planned terrorist attack on the film set. After it becomes known that Ali, as DeMille's driver, ran over an influential imam to escape a demonstrating mob in Cairo, it's only a matter of time before he faces some very bad music. He ends up spending many years in prison, where he's beaten and tortured by an escaped Nazi welcomed into Egypt—supposedly "a new beacon of liberty"—for such purposes. The book is presented as Ali's firsthand account of his experiences, written years later for his radicalized American grandson, who sporadically emails his responses to it from jihadi training grounds unknown. These interruptions prove superficial in linking fundamentalism past and present and examining religious belief, but otherwise this departure by Blauner from his urban thrillers—including Sunrise Highway (2018) and Proving Ground (2017)—is great storytelling, a coming-of-age tale with a love story at its heart. The drama is leavened with wry accounts of the mercurial DeMille and his buff star, Charlton "Chuck" Heston. A Jewish documentary filmmaker thought to be an Israeli spy is straight out of classic noir. All in all, an inspired idea skillfully executed.

A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.

Kirkus Reviews