A Cafe on the Nile (Anton Rider) - Softcover

Bull, Bartle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628157658 ISBN 13: 9781628157659

Publisher: Speaking Volumes, LLC, 2017

Synopsis

A grand historical novel of romance and high adventure thatroils in cosmopolitan Cairo and sprawls across the highlands of East Africa.

A Café on the Nile

It is 1935 in East Africa. Mussolini's armies are streaming by the hundreds of thousands through Suez on a march to Ethiopia. In the desert the Italian Air Force, equipped with bombs and poison gas, prepares for invasion. Abyssinia sits on the edge of a nightmare that will alter modern history, while safaris in the African highlands cater to the excesses of the wealthy and disenchanted. And in Cairo, on the Nile, the cosmopolitan crowd gathers at the Cataract Café to gamble with destiny.

All paths cross at the Cataract Café. There, with a single word, a simple gesture, an extravagant gift, alliances are drawn, deals made, and fates unwittingly determined for the memorable cast of characters that people this tale of high adventure. There professional hunter Anton Rider's Gypsy blood runs cold when he spies his estranged wife, Gwenn, with her lover, the Italian count and aviator Lorenzo Grimaldi. There the spoiled, rich American twins from Lexington, Bernadette and Harriet Mills, contract Rider for an ill-fated safari across East Africa with Ernst von Decken, a German freebooter who has stolen a fortune in silver from the Italian army. There Olivio Alavedo, the Goan proprietor of the Cataract Café, celebrates the fifty years that have blessed him with the friendship of the down-at-the-heel English lord Adam Penfold, with a good wife, six daughters, an exotic mistress, and useful political connections. A dwarf, Olivio also suffers his age and knows he won’t see fifty-five. But no one knows just how dangerously the days are numbered at the Cataract Café.

Praise for Bartle Bull

“You finish this book almost out of breath . . . appreciative of Mr. Bull’s spirited, sensuous, hot-blooded evocation of a rich and eventfulhistorical world.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

“A rip-roaring yarn . . . chock-full of fine ingredients: a cupfulof Casablanca, a dollop of Isak Dinesen, a pinch of Indiana Jonesand a touch of Tender Is the Night. Bull enriches the mix with awhite-hot plot and genuinely dashing descriptive writing.” —USA Today

About this title

Review:

Where are the new Casablancas coming from? Here's one possible source. Bartle Bull, a lawyer, publisher, explorer, and writer, centers his latest thriller at the Cataract Cafe, a floating version of Rick's in 1935 Cairo. The owner, Olivio, is a dwarf from Goa, and his regular customers include a stalwart British professional hunter, his unfaithful wife and her lover, an Italian aviator, American twin sisters in search of all kinds of adventure, and various rogue Germans, including a doctor who regrets not being able to use Olivio for medical research. Bull's writing is wry and deceptively simple:

The waiter set before the doctor a glass of warm boiled water and the flesh of a Nile perch, cleaned from the bone and rearranged on the plate in the shape of a smaller fish. The water was pink from the three spoonfuls of vinegar that had been stirred into it, the day's first weapon in his battle with arthritis. The German leaned forward. His high hooked nose hung over the table like a chimney over a fireplace as he widened his nostrils and smelled the fish.

Outside the cafe, larger forces are at work: Mussolini is helping to start World War II with his attacks on Abyssinia, and other countries are jockeying for power. By focusing on the lives of a few assorted cafe goers, Bull makes his book add up to much more than a hill of beans--he gives us a rich, exciting picture of a world about to disappear. --Dick Adler

About the Author:

Bartle Bull was born in London and educated at Harvard University and Magdalen College, Oxford. A student of Africa for over thirty years, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Explorers Club. A former publisher of The Village Voice, Bull wrote an environmental column for the Voice and later for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure, the definitive history of the African safari.

About this edition

• Publisher: Speaking Volumes, LLC
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1628157658
• ISBN 13: 9781628157659
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480