Fiction Review: Dreamers of the Day

Christian Science Monitor (Yvonne Zipp)

This is a novel about the Cairo Conference of 1921, which has far more to do with the rest of the Middle East than it does with Egypt, but I've put it in anyway just on the offchance that it may be of interest:

Mary Doria Russell’s fourth novel, “Dreamers of the Day,” takes its title from T.E. Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”: “[T]he dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

Agnes herself isn’t much for daydreaming – it’s too painful. When a man who was courting Agnes falls in love with her pretty younger sister and whisks her off to Lebanon, “no one was less surprised than me,” she says. . . .

Then the great influenza epidemic of 1919 wipes out her entire family. Reeling with grief, but finally free of her mother’s critical eye, Agnes decides to live a little. One makeover later, she’s on her way to Cairo.

“Dreamers of the Day” doesn’t shift into high gear until about 50 pages in, but patient readers will be rewarded when Agnes arrives at the Semiramis Hotel and stumbles into history. When the doorman refuses to let Agnes inside (either because of her flapper costume or because of her dachshund), the commotion attracts the attention of T.E. Lawrence and Lady Gertrude Bell, who, along with Winston Churchill and assorted other luminaries, are in Egypt to redraw the boundaries of the modern Middle East.

See the above page for the entire review.