American couple Port and Kit Moresby seek to escape the corrupting influences of the modern world by travelling into the Algerian Sahara. Wherever you travel, though, you never really escape yourself. The exotic landscapes, and the trials within them, only serve to intensify the couple’s mutual estrangement. Latch this onto a pervasive mood of threatening danger and we get a strangely disturbing psychological novel.
Brought out on film in 1990 by Bernardo Bertolucci (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100594/?ref_=sr_1) with John Malkovich and Debra Winger. Available on DVD at http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sheltering-Sky-Debra-Winger/dp/B001TJKVHS/ref=pd_sim_b_2
368 pages in Penguin Classics paperback edition.
ISBN 978-0141187778
Paul Bowles