As Agnes’s feelings for Karl deepen, so does her understanding of the issues in the post-Ottoman Empire world, and the reader is privileged to sit in on high-level meetings, experience the heat and crowds of Egypt, and live through incidents revealing the insight and power of Lawrence.Īgnes returns to reality, and the hard times of the 1930s and beyond-about which she moralizes from the afterlife, which is a rather clunky device. Agnes meets the aloof, intellectual Gertrude Bell, befriends a young, imperialist Winston Churchill, and is intrigued by Karl Weilbacher, a German “businessman” who Lawrence repeatedly implies is not in Cairo by chance, and who loves Agnes’s dog Rosie nearly as much as she does. Lawrence is attending the famed Cairo Conference of 1921, attempting to mediate the politics- and religion-riddled creation and boundary-setting of countries including Iran, Iraq, and Palestine.

Lawrence (“Neddy”), and once Agnes meets up with him upon her arrival in Cairo the action moves quickly. One of her sister’s friends from that time turns out to be none other than T. Her story is that of a shy, plain teacher in Cleveland, all alone after the mortality of the Great War and the Great Influenza she inherits a little money and decides to spend it on a trip to Egypt, following the footsteps of her now-deceased sister’s wedding sojourn. Narrator Agnes Shanklin speaks to us from the afterlife, where she is able to overlay her great tale with the perspective of time.

Mary Doria Russell takes readers from post-World War I Ohio to Egypt and back again in this roman à clef of the creation of the Middle East as we (mostly) know it today.

Dreamers in Hell by Janet E. Morris