Some parts of the book

CHAPTER 1

Seen from a plane, the car would have looked like a slow beetle creeping across an endless beach, the sun glinting off its polished black armour. In fact, it was doing thirty miles per hour, the maximum safe speed on a road that had unexpected potholes and cracks. No one wanted to get a flat tyre in the Sahara Desert.

The road led north from N'Djamena, capital city of Chad, through the desert towards Lake Chad, the biggest oasis in the Sahara. The landscape was a long, flat vista of sand and rock with a few pale-yellow dried-up bushes and a random scatter of large and small stones, everything the same shade of mid-tan, as bleak as a moonscape.

The desert was unnervingly like outer space, Tamara Levit thought, with the car as a rocket ship. If anything went wrong with her space suit she could die. The comparison was fanciful, and made her smile. All the same, she glanced into the back of the car, where there were two reassuringly large plastic demijohns of water, enough to keep them all alive in an emergency, until help arrived, probably.