Enid Shomer has written four books of poetry and two short story collections (including Tourist Season). Now, in her early 60s, she's published her first novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, an entrancing story about a meeting between two famous people before they were famous (and who never actually met).
Egypt, 1849: The frustrated, cynical Gustave Flaubert is on a Nile cruise; so is an idealistic woman afflicted with desespoir named Florence Nightingale. Accompanying Flaubert is his good friend Maxime De Camp, excitedly photographing artifacts while Flaubert collects rubbings for him. With Flo is Trout, her maid, who carries around her waist a large key, a reminder of her lover in England.
There's no mystery to solve here or disaster for Flaubert and Nightingale to overcome together, just a delicate and slow unwinding of their powerful, complex personalities as they discuss their hopes with each other while climbing pyramids, crossing the Sahara and visiting the Red Sea. In some ways, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile is an epistolary novel, so important are the personal and reflective letters the two send each other by courier. Flaubert is at first "your humble servant" then "your friend" and she his Rossignal, then "my dear songbird."
Shomer conducted prodigious amounts of research to re-create this Victorian world and provide authentic portraits of Flaubert and Nightingale. But she wears that research lightly, as Shomer the poet provides us with lush prose and a subtle, palpable depiction of the internal torments suffered by two geniuses. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher