A Journey to Al Ramel

For fans of David Mitchell, Kurt Vonnegut, and W.G. Sebald, A Journey to Al Ramel tells the story of Benard St. Martin, a young Parisian who, disguised as a Berber woman and in the company of Berber guides, sets out on September 13th, 1930, to be the first European in the modern era to reach Al Ramel, a long-abandoned trading post in the Spanish Sahara. Inspired by earlier writers and adventurers, St. Martin wants to find out what he's made of, but he has been warned, in a letter written by Isabelle, a mysterious traveler who dies before he is born, that catastrophe lies ahead. Afraid that he is being followed, he nevertheless journeys deeper and deeper into the contested territory and, with each step, becomes more and more dislocated, seemingly finding himself in the desert and in a malevolent café in Vienna, in the desert and scrambling for his life down the side of a mountain in Cyprus, in the desert and in the a jungle near a factory that churns out human skulls day and night, and more. Increasingly ill, yet determined to reach his destination, St. Martin becomes more and more unstuck, more and more entwined with the lives of Sir Richard Francis Burton, Arthur Rimbaud, and other travelers caught up in savage pilgrimages to nowhere.