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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.
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“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
minor 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, former 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
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