Nile

Nile is a sweeping, multi-generational saga that tells the bittersweet tale of a tender love affair between an Upper Egyptian peasant and a rich Alexandrian Jew. In its arcform a Bible-age village along the Nile to a kibbutz in Israel, Nile unforgettably captures the human underpinnings of the Middle East in our time. This saga of star-crossed lovers who find, lose, and ultimately redeem each other is set against the war-torn canvas of contemporary Egyptian and Israeli history from the end of World War II to the Camp David Accords.

Along the way, this debut novel in the five-volume standalone Devine Sagas by Laurie Devine asks a very human question: in the Middle East how do good people endure so much psychic pain, and how does that trauma manifest in history? The Devine Sagas—Nile, Saudi, Crescent, Kronos and Cypress—were written and published 1979-1994, some by Simon & Schuster in New York and all by Andre Deutsch in London. Now, in 2024, for the first time they are being published in digital editions, and by December will be available everywhere on Amazon Kindle.

These novels all rest soundly on history and are fictional stories modeled on the lives of real people—especially women of the developing world—and aim to tell the deepest truths behind headlines. Their blood and guts are reflections of real human suffering. So are their heartfelt emotions of love, shame, hate, healing, and forgiveness, which lie at the birth of history.

Nile begins in a small Muslim village, with a graphic and searing female circumcision which unforgettably maims the girl. Life here in many ways still reflects the time of the Pharaohs in terms of of fear, danger, and magic. Among what is feared and dangerous, and sometimes most magical, is a village woman who violates ancient taboos—a woman such as Mona.

On the morning when a painful ancient ritual marks Mona’s coming of age, her mother defiantly vows: It will be better for Mona than it was for my mother, and for my mother’s mother. It is a promise that Mona is destined to fulfill, though not at all in the way her mother intended….

At the same time, yet light-years away, in the sleek Westernized world of cosmopolitan Alexandria, Youssef al-Masri is growing up in a rich, powerful, secular Arab-Jewish family. His is a world of exclusive British schools and afternoon tea in velvet drawing rooms. Youssef is destined at best for a life at the secure center of Alexandria’s international life, at worst for a life of belly-dancer-bedazzled and hashish-scented dissipation. Destined, that is, until he and Mona meet and fall into an impossible love, and history tears their world and them apart.

For two generations, through the 1948 and Suez conflicts, the 1967 and October wars, in the backwaters of Upper Egypt and in the slums of Cairo, on a kibbutz near Gaza and inside the Old City walls of Jerusalem, Mona and Youssef, their children, and their children’s children, try to repair that fatal rift—their lives emblematic of the family blood feud that still rends the Middle East today.