Two of my favourite indie authors, Don Bailey and Kerry Donovan, are part of this fourteen author eBook box set.
Crikey, what will they think of next? Two box sets for the price of one? Discount for seniors? Free popcorn?
If the other twelve authors are as good as Bailey and Donovan, then it will be 99c well spent. You can get it on Amazon here.
Read what my advance reviewers are saying about Cairo Mon Amour.
… a clever, fast paced thriller full of twists, turns and blind alleys. Campbell’s knowledge of the Egypt of the early 70’s allows him to take the reader right there, tasting the foods, inhaling the smells, seeing the sights and gaining an intimate insight into Egyptian life. – Sarah Bourne, Australia
… a brilliantly written work of “faction.” Cairo Mon Amour is a great read, and it was intriguing to learn about the goings on in Cairo in one of the most tumultuous periods in Middle Eastern history. – Peter Ralph, Australia
… brilliant in so many, many ways. As I read, there were times that I felt as though I was walking out on a narrow gangplank. I couldn’t breathe, then I gasped for breath. – Fran Guenette, Canada
… sharp and incisive prose … The book is a tour de force. I can’t wait for the promised sequel. – Kerry Donovan, France
Full versions of the reviews can be found at the Cairo Mon Amour Facebook page here.
Cairo Mon Amour will be available at the end of June 2017.
This beautiful book cover for Cairo Mon Amour has an interesting evolution. It was actually designed for a self-published edition of the book, but I offered the artwork to my publisher, who was happy to take it over.
When I first discussed the project with my designer Rachel Ainge of Tribe Creative Co, I imagined a cover that tried to tell the story. I cooked up the idea of an aerial shot of Cairo with a pair of women’s shoes (containing feet) on the ledge of a building.
Rachel took things in hand: “Don’t try to tell the story. Leave it with me.” We’d had this discussion before when I’d talked her into creating covers that told the stories of two other books of mine. They were lovely covers, but did they help to sell books? I wasn’t sure. Here they are, along with one of my crude sketches:
Rachel came back to me with the idea of branding the three books under a common theme, including new covers for the older books, and a new title for one of them.
Over to me for the theme. I thought hard about what linked the three books: A contemporary Australian political satire, a psychological drama set in England, and a thriller/romance set during the Yom Kippur War. How were they connected?
It came to me in a flash while I was walking on the beach (that’s where my most creative thinking takes place): Love, betrayal and redemption. That’s what I really write about.
This gave me a formula for uniform subtitles for the three books:
Incidentally it gave me my elevator pitch: Stuart Campbell writes quirky novels about love, betrayal and redemption.
Next, Rachel asked me for an iconic scene for each book. “I’ll give you the blockbuster treatment – a big dramatic sky and characters looking into their destiny,” she said. I came up with Martin Mooney looking at the distant mountains, Jack Walsingham approaching a rural cottage, and Pierre Farag and Mark Bellamy riding towards the Pyramids. This is what I got:
And I’m very happy with the result!
Cairo Mon Amour will be published in late June 2017 by Austin Macauley Publishers, an independent trade publisher with headquarters in London and New York.
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War makes an irresistible setting for fiction, as the never-ending flood of WWII novels and movies shows. Gulf War thrillers are almost a genre in their own right.
The Yom Kippur War has its novels – Herman Wouk and Tom Clancy both weave stories around it. But I wanted to do something different – my novel set during the Yom Kippur War Cairo Mon Amour, is set in Egypt – not Israel.
I felt especially well qualified to write this book: I was a student at Cairo University when the war broke out in October 1973, and I had a ringside seat – or sometimes a seat under the kitchen table when the air-raid sirens went off.
If you can’t remember the main points about this particular conflict, Egypt invaded Sinai to reclaim land lost to Israel in 1967, and Syria attacked the Golan Heights. The conequences of the war included the 1978 Camp David Accords and the final withdrawal of Israel from Sinai in 1982.
What compelled me to write this book was the extraordinary lengths that Egypt went to in concealing the date of the attack. How did President Sadat keep preparations for a massive ground and air attack secret? And how could I spin a story of espionage and romance around this?
Details have emerged in memoirs and works of research: Hospital wards in Cairo were emptied under the pretext of epidemics in anticipation of floods of wounded troops; a military sports carnival was scheduled for the day of the attack; false stories were planted about the attack date. When I did my research, I found so many events that I could dramatise: The sudden evacuation of Soviet families just days before the outbreak of war; the last ship to leave Alexandria, crowded with Americans desperate to get away.
I also wanted to write a very human story, so I created a handful of flawed characters who all have a personal stake in finding out – or concealing – the date when the attack will be launched. We have a Cairo private eye of mixed Armenian and Coptic background; his childhood sweetheart who is now a notorious actress; a Soviet diplomat with divided loyalties; and two British spies who happen to be former lovers.
I made a decision to stick closely to the historical record: The chapters in the first part of the book follow exactly the days just before and after the start of the war. When the Soviet diplomat Zlotnik, drunk in his flat, hears the rumble of the huge Soviet aircraft flying in armaments, it is real; I heard them on that very night myself.
And I tried to capture the day-to-day atmosphere in the streets of Cairo, when, as a British student taking Arabic courses at Cairo University, I found myself in the midst of a populace that swung between elation at the first flush of victory, and distress as the dead and wounded began to stagger home.
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Stuart Campbell author 