Product Information
The End of Sleep
By: Rowan Somerville
| Retail Price: | $32.99 |
| Booktopia Price | $27.50 |
Published: January 2008
All prices in Australian Dollars
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As the first prayer call of the day sounds over the ancient city, Fin stumbles into an exotic adventure that will take him to the very edge of his courage, his endurance and his sense of self. He seeks a story - a story about treasure - and to find it, he must first find his friend Farouk, the mercurial teller of tales, who alone knows what Fin needs to hear.
Fuelled by whisky and a thousand glasses of tea Fin pursues his quest under the shadow of the Great Pyramid, through crowded kebab shops and into the great emptiness of the desert itself. Set against the background of a magnificently crumbling city, The End of Sleep is an incantatory tale about a man desperately seeking meaning. It is also a riotous love letter to Arab culture, its rich history, humour, food and friendship and above all to the transformative power of storytelling.
Rowan Somerville was born near the Tottenham Court Road in 1966. He has worked in television, film and radio, including making the odd documentary and some unmentionable television programmes. He has spent a lot of time in the Arab world but now lives in Donegal with a grey and hairy dog. The End of Sleep is his first novel.
Booktopia Review
Reviewed by Toni Whitmont
This aptly titled is one of our favourite mid-year releases.
First time Irish novelist, Rowan Somerville, engages us so thoroughly in his romp through modern day Cairo, that in fact, it was also the end of sleep for Booktopia, at least until we finished the story.
Fin, an Irish journalist with a love/hate relationship with the chaos that is Cairo, is drawn inexorably into the seamy side of life while on the hunt for the one story that could save his mediocre career.
Entwined with the fate of his erstwhile friend Farouk, and buoyed up with endless alternating rounds of whiskey and mint tea, Fin becomes obsessed with finding out the fate of a local villager whose house may have been built above an ancient treasury.
With the endless desert both a backdrop, and a metaphor for Fin's own wasteland of a soul, The End of Sleep is a western take on how contemporary Arab culture is welded to its fierce pride in its antiquity.
That aside, The End of Sleep offers lots of action, some richly comic scenes and some dazzling story telling. And if it gives you a taste for all things Egyptian, try The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany, a fabulously rich, multi-layered pot boiler which tracks the intertwining tale of the inhabitants of this (real) apartment block in Cairo.
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