Through The Peacock Gate - Tapa blanda

Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through The Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerizing, magical heart of secret Morocco.

TAHIR SHAH

The novel is a rare example of contemporary English fiction drawing on traditional Moroccan folklore. Written in gripping English prose fused with Arabic words, the novel gives an authentic insight into a Westerner’s experience of modern Moroccan society, whilst simultaneously exposing the reader to the country’s rich cultural history by weaving classic Moroccan folk takes and the mysteries of Sufism into its fabric. The book not only explores the point where East and West merge, but the collision of the human world with the world of the djinns - mysterious shape-shifting creatures of an unseen realm.

SANDY McCUTCHEON is a New Zealander but lived most of his adult life in Australia as an author, playwright, actor, broadcaster and journalist. He has written twenty plays and a number of novels, including Black Widow (2006) which won the Christina Stead Award for Literature, and The Magician’s Son (2005), an autobiographical work on the true nature of his ancestry. He
currently resides in Morocco where he has close ties with a Sufi brotherhood, and has a large following on his website ‘The View from Fez’ which he runs with his wife, the photojournalist Suzanna Clarke.