The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

Enid Shomer

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451642988
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

Before she became the nineteenth century's greatest heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled down the Nile at the same time. In the imaginative leap taken by award-winning writer Enid Shomer's The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, the two ignite a passionate friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies. In 1850, Florence, daughter of a prominent English family, sets sail on the Nile chaperoned by longtime family friends and her maid, Trout. To her family's chagrin—and in spite of her wealth, charm, and beauty—she is, at twenty-nine and of her own volition, well on her way to spinsterhood. Meanwhile, Gustave and his good friend Maxime Du Camp embark on an expedition to document the then largely unexplored monuments of ancient Egypt. Traumatized by the deaths of his father and sister, and plagued by mysterious seizures, Flaubert has dropped out of law school and writ-ten his first novel, an effort promptly deemed unpublishable by his closest friends. At twenty-eight, he is an unproven writer with a failing body. Florence is a woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men. Gustave is a notorious womanizer and patron of innumerable prostitutes. But both burn with unfulfilled ambition, and in the deft hands of Shomer, whose writing The New York Times Book Review has praised as "beautifully cadenced, and surprising in its imaginative reach, " the unlikely soul mates come together to share their darkest torments and most fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth-century Egypt.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: Father Mustache and the Father of Thinness
• Chapter 2: Chatelaines
• Chapter 3: Dancing the Bee
• Chapter 4: La Vie De Florence Rossignol
• Chapter 5: Letters
• Chapter 6: Mirage
• Chapter 7: The World is Made of Water
• Chapter 8: Not a Woman
• Chapter 9: The Weighing of the Heart
• Chapter 10: A Visit to the Patriarchs
• Chapter 11: Frightful Row with Trout
• Chapter 12: Lamentation at Philae
• Chapter 13: Mahatta
• Chapter 14: Toothache
• Chapter 15: Kenneh
• Chapter 16: A Cabinet of Relics
• Chapter 17: Père Issa
• Chapter 18: Caravan
• Chapter 19: Koseir
• Chapter 20: The Dying Sun
• Chapter 21: Old Koseir
• Chapter 22: Absences
• Chapter 23: “This is Traut’s Book”
• Chapter 24: Lemon Ices and Raki
• Chapter 25: Among the Ababdeh
• Chapter 26: Fever
• Chapter 27: Beautiful Cairo
• Chapter 28: Crocodile Gods
• Chapter 29: Call from God
• Chapter 30: The Ritual of Treading
• Chapter 31: The Twelfth Room
• Acknowledgments, Sources, and a Note
• About the Author
• Copyright