Deep Sahara
Author: Leslie Croxford (Selwyn 1963)
Publisher: Momentum Books
Recovering from a nervous breakdown provoked by the death of his wife, a man takes advice from a family friend and retreats to a monastery in the deep Sahara to sketch desert insects for a book.
Upon arrival, however, he comes upon an appalling crime. Numb and exhausted, he declines a police chief’s urgent suggestion that he leave. Despite his shock, the desert seems to promise solace, a vast nullity against which he can take stock of himself and do his work.
Yet, over the following weeks and months, his solitude is broken by a succession of encounters, all strange but somehow connected to him. Each appears to conceal some kind of secret. Even the insects he has come to study are mysteriously deformed, embodying an awful, hidden reality…
The man is forced to confront the echoes of one of the darkest moments in modern history, and to come to terms with the deepest mysteries of his own past.
Deep Sahara is a suspenseful exploration of one man’s emotional resurgence, rendered sparingly and with great physical and psychological precision.