COMING SOON:

Imagine a kind of Tales of the City but set in Riyadh, the desert capital of Saudi Arabia, and on the banks of the Seine in the heart of Paris, combined with the mystery and action of some of the best comical thrillers by Graham Greene. 

In a Desert or a City is a post-modern picaresque full of LGBT folk; Blacks from Saudi Arabia, the Caribbean, and Harlem; and many other multi­­–cultural characters from the New World, Europe, and the Middle East. The good, the bad, and the foolish are all part of the alluring brew of the narrative, and one very special character who plays a crucial role in the mystery at the heart of the novel. 

Sawyer Aaron Summerfield (23), fresh out of grad school in the Midwest, arrives in the Middle East to take on his first teaching job. Soon, he is abducted into a world that will change his life forever and put it in great danger. Sawyer’s love affair with a Very Important Prince will not turn out to be just a fleeting romance. Sawyer calls him Prince ‘Cartier’ (25) to disguise his easily recognizable identity, and to reference the Rings of Al-Qismah which he gives Sawyer. Trapped in the Royal World of hyper-Arabia, and tripped up by his own missteps, Sawyer is forced to escape from the Kingdom for his life, liberty, and his own version of the pursuit of happiness.

Everything branches out from there into labyrinths of loyalty, passion, betrayal, and redemption in which Sawyer will discover his own true mission. Followed by competing Saudi factions to the City of Light and Love, Sawyer stumbles into a very Gay Paree, right into the lap and the faded glory of the once illustrious Raymond Onion Akadémia and Onion Theater. He seeks refuge with Goldie’s Théâtre Mondial d’Avant-Garde de Paris, peopled by a patchwork quilt of international actors, scholars, and seekers.

Sawyer is bedazzled by the kaleidoscope of characters, onstage and off, who revolve around him and become entangled in his predicament. He tries to disappear into new roles, new identities, but gets pulled back into the dangerous world of politics and religions, and begins to question everything, including reality itself.

Will Johnny Stamps (24), the set designer and stage manager, and the Duchess of Rome (71), the lead actor, be able to save Sawyer from the pursuers who chase him from one end of his Moveable Feast to the other? 

Can the cast and crew keep Sawyer in the Latin Quarter of Paris and out of the Empty Quarter of Arabia, out of a desolate city to which he had been exiled by the Prince? And away from the Empty Quarter of his mind’s own fears?

Bolstered by a variety of engaging subplots that heighten the primary mystery and secrets that Sawyer has taken from the Kingdom, the narrative takes the reader from the deserts of Abraham of Ur of the Chaldees, through ancient and modern Arabia, to Paris of the 1980s, and finally onward to the Twin Towers and the New York of our own Brave New Millennium.

All the world’s a stage: adventure, suspense, farce, and real and faux history with absurdist tragicomic elements all mix in this cauldron of love and fear and belonging. The narrative becomes a search for one’s true self in an upside-down world.

Like life itself, this theater of the world contains both the most sorrowful tragedy and almost slapstick comedy, tears of joy and tears of infinite sadness, ending on 9/10/2001, with hope and a hint of enlightenment in spite of it all.