Dreamers of the Day

Forty-year-old teacher Agnes Shanklin resigned herself to a plain spinster's life, caring for her demanding and demeaning mother on the weekends after teaching unappreciative students all week. Her sister's life always seemed charmed and adventurous in comparison -- she was the "pretty one" who married well. Agnes was especially intrigued by her sister's adventures as a teacher in Palestine and her tales of a rogue scholar named T.E. Lawrence who befriended her there.

Everything changes in a moment when all of her family dies in the flu pandemic. Suddenly Agnes has a small inheritance and the freedom to do whatever she likes. A saucy department store clerk talks her into a makeover and the belief that she is in fact attractive. Animated by her newfound self-esteem, she impulsively books a trip to the Mideast which lands her in the middle of British movers and shakers in Egypt at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell are literally drawing new boundaries to create the modern-day nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. Only Lawrence understands that their arbitrary division of post-World War I spoils will sow seeds of inevitable, bloody conflict.

Russell deftly limns an historic period through the eyes of a woman experiencing real freedom for the first time as she has an affair with a German spy and is included in the social world of this elite British gathering.

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