Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently welcomed Peter Blauner to the bookstore. Blauner is the author of Picture in the Sand which was influenced by The Ten Commandments. If you watch the event, you’ll learn how Blauner was inspired. In the meantime, you can order a signed copy of Picture in the Sand, the bookstore’s Historical Fiction Novel of January through the Web Store. https://tinyurl.com/55w8f2wc
Here’s the description of Picture in the Sand.
“On rare occasions I read a book that reminds me of why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place. This is such a book.” —Stephen King
Peter Blauner’s epic Picture in the Sand is a sweeping intergenerational saga told through a grandfather’s passionate letters to his grandson, passing on the story of his political rebellion in 1950s Egypt in order to save his grandson’s life in a post-9/11 world.
When Alex Hassan gets accepted to an Ivy League university, his middle-class Egyptian-American family is filled with pride and excitement. But that joy turns to shock when they discover that he’s run off to the Middle East to join a holy war instead. When he refuses to communicate with everyone else, his loving grandfather Ali emails him one last plea. If Alex will stay in touch, his grandfather will share with Alex – and only Alex – a manuscript containing the secret story of his own life that he’s kept hidden from his family, until now.
It’s the tale of his romantic and heartbreaking past rooted in Hollywood and the post-revolutionary Egypt of the 1950s, when young Ali was a movie fanatic who attained a dream job working for the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille on the set of his epic film, The Ten Commandments. But Ali’s vision of a golden future as an American movie mogul gets upended when he is unwittingly caught up in a web of politics, espionage, and real-life events that change the course of history.
It’s a narrative he’s told no one for more than a half-century. But now he’s forced to unearth the past to save a young man who’s about to make the same tragic mistakes he made so long ago.
PETER BLAUNER is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of several other novels, including Slow Motion Riot, The Intruder, and Sunrise Highway. His books have been translated into twenty languages. Picture in the Sand is the culmination of two decades of writing and research that took him from Brooklyn to Cairo a half-dozen times.
The conversation is quite interesting, especially with stories both from Blauner and Peters talking about The Ten Commandments.