CASABLANCA BLUES Blaine Williams lives and breathes Casablanca. He’s trapped in a make-believe world of Bogart and Bergman, smoke-filled cafés, fugitives and hit-men. And he’s having a mid-life crisis. Having lost his girl, his job, and his home, he flees to the one place that’s always provided comfort in times of sorrow and despair: CASABLANCA Diving in at the deep end of Morocco’s most misunderstood city, Blaine is sucked down through the many interwoven layers until he hits its bedrock. And it’s there that he meets Ghita, a fabulously wealthy socialite, who’s got a plan for him – one laced with intrigue and revenge. Through an adventure paid out in twists and turns, Blaine and Ghita find themselves in a storyline straight out of Casablanca the movie. Hilarious, poignant, and shocking at times, CASABLANCA BLUES lifts the veil on modern Morocco and conjures a secret realm hidden from travellers and locals alike.
Author
Tahir Shah was born in London, and raised primarily at the family’s home, Langton House, in the English countryside – where founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden Powell was also brought up. Along with his twin and elder sisters, Tahir was continually coaxed to regard the world around him through Oriental eyes. This included being exposed from early childhood to Eastern stories, and to the back-to-front humour of the wise fool, Nasrudin. Having studied at a leading public school, Bryanston, Tahir took a degree in International Relations, his particular interest being in African dictatorships of the mid-1980s. His research in this area led him to travel alone through a wide number of failing African states, including Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Zaire. After university, Tahir embarked on a plethora of widespread travels through the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, and Africa, drawing them together in his first travelogue, Beyond the Devil’s Teeth. In the years that followed, he published more than a dozen works of travel. These quests – for lost cities, treasure, Indian magic, and for the secrets of the so-called Birdmen of Peru – led to what is surely one of the most extraordinary bodies of travel work ever published. In the early 2000s, with two small children, Tahir moved his young family from an apartment in London’s East End to a supposedly haunted mansion in the middle of a Casablanca shantytown. The tale of the adventure was published in his bestselling book, The Caliph’s House. In recent years, Tahir Shah has released a cornucopia of work, embracing travel, fiction, and literary criticism. He has also made documentaries for National Geographic TV and the History Channel, and published hundreds of articles in leading magazines, newspapers, and journals. His oeuvre is regarded as exceptionally original and, as an author, he is considered as a champion of the new face of publishing. www.tahirshah.com www.twitter.com/humanstew www.facebook.com/TahirShahAuthor http://www.youtube.com/user/tahirshah999 www.pinterest.com/tahirshah
