I rarely read romantic fiction, the only reason I picked up this book is that it had been translated from Georgian into English, and very few Georgian authors are translated into English. This is a Georgian bestseller, Georgia is a small market, so this merely relates to over 30 000 books having been sold.

The translation leaves much to be desired. There were many typos, and there were also lots of mistakes in English.

The geographical integrity of the tale is also somewhat lacking. Whilst, I realise that the climate is changing, we don’t yet have wet monsoons (the wet seems superfluous describing a monsoon) in the Sahara.

Neither has the Ebola virus made an impact on Saharan populations, virtually all the victims of Ebola being in sub-Saharan Africa…

…and Buddhist monks wandering (or should that be pilgriming?) in the Sahara ???

I also find it interesting that there is all the talk of Tamta, a young woman from the Occident, who goes to the Orient, but when journeying from Tbilisi in Georgia to Cairo in Egypt, she will actually have been travelling west. I appreciate in ancient times Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean was considered the Orient, but these days if we talk about the Orient in English we are thinking of China or South East Asia.

The story is about a Georgian girl who is kidnapped by a Bedouin in Cairo, there is much emphasis on the Bedouin’s scintillating grey eyes, and like a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, she falls in love with her captor. Her brother ventures to Egypt to find her and finds “it is difficult to drive through the desert at night.” (I’d have thought it would be difficult to drive in the Egyptian desert period). The Bedouin’s earlier love interest, Elham, is jealous of the new girl and schemes to kill Tamta.

Aside from all the errors and typos it is an easy read but this isn’t a genre that interests me. It didn’t notch my heart.

My rating 2 out of 5