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“Perhaps I must warn you first that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am certain of this much: My little story is becoming your history. You won’t really understand your times until you realize mine.”
So starts the account of Agnes Shanklin, the charmingly diffident narrator of Mary Doria Russell’s compelling new novel, Dreamers of your day. And what is Miss Shanklin’s “little story?” Nothing significantly less than the creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab world–and of our very own.
A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the fantastic War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has enter into a modest inheritance which allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Coming to the Semiramis Hotel equally as the Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions–and a little, noisy dachshund named Rosie–enters in to the company of the historic luminaries who will, in the space of a couple of days at a hotel in Cairo, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.
Neither a pawn nor a participant at the conference, Agnes is ostensibly insignificant, and that makes her a welcome sounding board for Churchill, Lawrence, and Bell. In addition, it makes her unexpectedly appealing to the charismatic German spy Karl Weilbacher. As Agnes observes the tumultuous inner workings of nation-building, she actually is drawn increasingly more deeply into geopolitical intrigue and toward an individual awakening.
With prose as graceful and effortless as a seductive float down the Nile, Mary Doria Russell illuminates the long, rich history of the Middle East with a tale that brilliantly elucidates today’s headlines. As enlightening as it is entertaining, Dreamers of the Day is a memorable, passionate, gorgeously written novel.
