fuonlyknew

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Welcome to my stop on the virtual book tour for Tamanrasett organized by Goddess Fish Promotions.

Author Edward Parr will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B&N Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner. Don’t forget to enter!

And you can click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

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Tamanrasett

By Edward Parr

 

 

Genre: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

TAMANRASSET is historical fiction set on the edge of the Sahara as the ancient world begins to fade and great empires collide. Four strangers—a mature Foreign Legionnaire, a Sharif’s wrathful son, an ambitious American archaeologist, and an abandoned Swedish widow—become adrift and isolated, but when their paths intersect, the fragile connections between them tell a story of survival and fate on the edge of the abyss. Blending the sweep of classic adventure with the horror of a great historical calamities, Edward Parr’s TAMANRASSET is a saga about the crossroads where nomads meet.

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Enjoy this peek inside:

Demoreau knelt beside Lieutenant Claussen. The Sergent had been in plenty of actions during more than twenty years of service in the Legion: The sun beating down, the barrel of his rifle smoking and hot from constant firing, the taste of sand and sulfur in his mouth as he and his comrades fought off their enraged enemy with nerves of steel and cooler heads. “Que voulez-vous? C’est la Legion!” A part of him relished it. He had a calmness of mind gained through years of experience and training. As he raised his rifle to aim at the advancing tribesmen, he recalled to his mind the melody of a fine composition, the death waltz by Saint-Saëns, which unrolled in his inner ear, turning his blood to ice. He hummed the tune as his rifle fired and his deadly accurate shooting dropped one rider after another.

Claussen was a good Lieutenant and had plenty of courage, but that did not mean he couldn’t benefit from Demoreau’s experience. The Sergent turned and faced his commander: “We’re being overwhelmed and losing too many men, Sir: We can’t maintain this position. We must move east onto the ridge where there’s cover among the rocks.”

“I know, but it may be too far, Sergent,” Claussen replied.

“Yes, it might,” the Sergent agreed, “but we still have to go: We’ll certainly all be killed if we stay here.”

Claussen looked distraught, but as he looked Demoreau in the eyes his nerve was hardened. Everything had to be done “par règlement” in the Foreign Legion. He nodded: “Yes, give the order, Sergent. Withdraw to the ridge; smartly, now.”

© 2025 by Edward Parr and Edwardian Press (New Orleans, Louisiana)

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Author Guest Post

A Journey Fraught with Peril

My novel Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad was inspired by the amazing body of action-adventure stories written about the French Foreign Legion which are set in the tumultuous early 20th century of northern Africa. As much as I enjoy these stories when taken in isolation in the spirit they were written at the time, its difficult to ignore subsequent events. I knew that if I were to write a new adventure of that era, I would absolutely need to show both sides of the story: Who were the Legionnaires? Who were the people fighting the French Foreign Legion, and what were their objectives? What were they really like?

As I continued doing research, it seemed to me that not only were a lot of the potential characters in the story Muslim, but that in some fundamental way Islam is a part of that place. There can be no doubt that writing about Islam and writing Muslim characters is fraught with peril. Just ask author Salman Rushdie: his novel, The Satanic Verses, contains a plotline where the Prophet is alleged to have transcribed verses dictated by Satan. This resulted in Iran’s Supreme Leader issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination, followed by years of threats, hiding, and even a violent attack on the author in 2022. But I will say that there is nothing like that in my novel. For the record, I specifically wanted readers to see the Muslim characters as real, sympathetic people, people practicing a rigorous but perhaps even understandable religion, a religion where the meaning of Qur’anic verses have been argued over for centuries in the same way as verses of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, are argued over by Jewish and Christian scholars. The people of northern Africa are a varied and diverse people who for the most part live in communities of kind, like-minded individuals, men and women. In the end, I even elected to hire a sensitivity reader, a Muslim woman educator in Morocco, to give me her thoughts. I incorporated all of her invaluable suggestions.

I also wanted to make clear that the anger experienced by the native people of northern Africa, regardless of religion, was in some cases justified, and that any violence that ensued came not from religion per se but from the treatment of the native people whose countries were actually being violently conquered by France. Once France began to march soldiers directly into Morocco, it’s hardly surprising that locals would push back. On the other hand, I had no interest in vilifying the French Foreign Legionnaires who served in northern Africa. The vast majority of those soldiers enlisted in the Foreign Legion for personal reasons – some joined to avoid the law, to become a soldier the only place they could, or to find adventure, among many other reasons. Most Legionnaires were not French, and the aims of the French government were mostly irrelevant to them. The Legion asks its recruits to dedicate themselves to their fellow Legionnaires and to serve with honor even in the most desperate and the most boring deployments, and that’s the ethos and brotherhood I wanted to depict.

In the end, I hope the story is one that can be taken at face value and without assuming any underlying ideological objective on my part. The story is, ultimately, about the vast emptiness of the Sahara, and those who were there before the world changed and the vast unknown places disappeared forever. Needless to say, the array of people there at the time was remarkable.

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About Author Edward Parr:

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Edward (“Ted”) Parr studied playwriting at New York University in the 1980’s, worked with artists Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and staged his own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. He published his Kingdoms Fall trilogy of World War One espionage adventure novels which were collectively awarded Best First Novel and Best Historical Fiction Novel by Literary Classics in 2016. He has always had a strong interest in expanding narrative forms, and in his novel writing, he explores older genres of fiction (like the pulp fiction French Foreign Legion adventures or early espionage fiction) as inspiration to examine historical periods of transformation. His main writing inspirations are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bernard Cornwell, Georges Surdez, and Patrick O’Brien.

 

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