order
with
and take 25% off cover price
|
After twenty years of
fixing Boeing aircraft alongside Saudi mechanics,
Charlie Durango reckons he understands the Saudi
mentality in Jeddah pretty well. In fact, so
confident is Durango in his perceptions that
for a few thousand bucks he helps Khalid Ba
Sallah, a Saudi colleague, conceal two kilos
of cocaine on a New York-bound 747. Unfortunately,
anti-American remarks Khalid has made haunt
Charlie and prompt him to try and glean whether
or not he has put on board the airliner something
more sinister than coke.
Sara Santos stares into Saudi Arabia from another
angle. Her eyes gaze down the shaft of a mop
handle at life in a middle-class Saudi family.
A maid from the Philippines, Sara has been languishing,
trapped and abused, in a Jeddah household for
the last twelve years, with no prospect of escaping
until now. Sara has just palmed a U.S. passport,
and she is using her final threads of will to
alter it and flee Saudi Arabia on a New York–bound
flight — the flight aboard which Charlie
has, hopefully, hidden only cocaine.
Charlie, Sara, and other central characters
of Exit Only represent but a few people
among a myriad of personalities on Jeddah’s
“Arab street.” Pakistani taxi drivers,
Egyptian clerks, Saudi youths male and female,
Western pilots and flight attendants, government
workers, British charlatans, hash-smoking ESL
instructors, and many others toil there, too.
Collectively, their personal development defines
contemporary Saudi Arabia and powers the plot
and themes of this pre-September 11 novel.
Allegorical by nature and evolvement, satiric
and cynical by characterization, and rapid by
pacing, Exit Only is more than a suspense
novel set in locale of current interest. It’s
a blistering quest and climax on the Red Sea
shores.
About
the author
 |
Readers’ reviews:
“To my surprise (surprise because I don't have time
for novels) .
. . I was quite taken by its depiction
of the bleak realities of Saudi life.” —
Dr. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle
East Forum, a prize-winning columnist for
the New York Sun and the Jerusalem
Post.
“With hordes of journalists and pundits stereotyping
Saudis, here, at last, is an insider’s narrative
of Arabia's Western community, and it is not a
pretty one. Exit Only is the first ever
lids-off account of people who have for decades
constituted Saudi Arabia's guest worker population,
and their interaction with their hosts.”
— Jonathon Summerhayes, former
UK diplomat in Saudi Arabia
“An eyewitness’s account of Brits and Americans
living, working, and being up to no good in Saudi
Arabia. Bracken clearly has seen it all and no
doubt participated in such escapades, and this
is what makes this such a close-up, compelling,
and deeply disturbing view of the other side of
life in the desert kingdom.” — Chuck
Bowman, retired oil worker with Halliburton in
Saudi Arabia
trade paperback
5.25" X 8.25"
328 pp.
list price $21.50
ISBN-13: 978-0-9728321-8-2
ISBN-10: 0-9728321-8-1 |
|
|
