The Hawk of Egypt

About the book

Damaris Hethencourt enters Cairo's crowded markets with her bulldog Wellington, eager to find the animals sold beyond the familiar tourist streets. There she notices Hugh Carden Ali, the son of an Egyptian sheikh and an English mother, whose appearance unsettles her easy assumptions about nationality. Conquest builds a desert romance from this meeting, surrounding attraction with family history, danger, and an elaborate language of fate. Animals, richly described interiors, and the contrast between English society and desert life help create the book's atmosphere. Its fascination with cultural difference is inseparable from the racial stereotypes and romanticized views of Egypt that shape the narration. Read as period fiction, it reveals how desire and inherited identity become the organizing mysteries of an exotic adventure.

• Desire and destiny
• Mixed cultural identity
• Romanticized landscapes

Why read it

The first encounter makes Damaris's uncertainty about Hugh's identity central to both the attraction and the novel's period assumptions.

English Macaulay Company edition, copyright 1922