Saudi

What could make a lively and attractive young Western woman don the mask and the veil and give herself in marriage to a man who already has a wife and child?

Love, that’s what, a most passionate love, melded with a swashbuckling independent American woman’s yearning for adventure on a grand scale—which some would call high romance and others might scorn as a crazy kind of reckless gamble that of course life would deliver what she wanted.

How does that work out for Sunny Shannon, a blonde from New England endowed with many resources—resilience, charm, passion, and a belief that all will be well in the end? Can she not only survive but thrive in this other world that comes with the man she loves?

Laurie Devine, an American author with a gift for storytelling of brave and indomitable women of the developing and Western world, continues her stand-alone Devine Sagas with a multi-generational tale of courage and faith, of romance and big oil money gushing from Saudi Arabia.

The Devine Sagas—Nile, Saudi, Crescent, Kronos and Cypress—are novels 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 these five novels are being published in digital editions and by December of 2024 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.

Saudi reverberates with Laurie Devine’s storytelling verve, which vividly have made the Devine Sagas an international success. It begins in 1938 on what was then called the Persian Gulf. After a moment of mortal terror on a cruelly sultry afternoon, the story continues for a half-century in the world of modern big Mideast oil money impacting what seems like a medieval desert kingdom. As their small excursion boat explodes into flames, an American oilman sacrifices his Arab friend in a vain attempt to save his own American wife, who is mother of their infant daughter. That fateful and tragic decision sets in motion a relentless cycle of love and betrayal of their Arab and American children, and their children’s children. The first-generation descendants of that afternoon—the idealistic, independent Sunny Shannon, and the Saudi Arabian brothers Rashid and Muhammad Al-Murrah—share destinies that are forever intertwined. Their lives sweep from the romantic vastness of the Saudi desert where the Al-Murrah tribesmen still pitch black tents beneath the stars, to the boomtowns of the American oil company in Saudi Arabia. It encompasses small-town New England life as well as ancient-seeming tribal encampments near the aptly named Empty Quarter. It shares the cultural confusion of lonely young Arabs studying in American and British graduate schools, lingers in OPEC’s Vienna boardrooms, and portrays the siege of Mecca that costs Sunny and Rashid their son. Saudi is a novel of the heartbreaks, excesses, and triumphs of East and West, a tale of oil and power and money, and of guilty secrets. But Saudi is finally a story of what is perhaps the enduring love of a woman and a man, both proud and strong and striving for goodness and wisdom. It is a tale that throws the moral ambiguities of the modern West into conflict with the timeless values of the Arabian desert. Just as in life, in one way everyone wins and at the same time everyone loses; but the wonderment in this story is whether love does conquer all.