Petra a novel

PETRA A NOVEL explores the redemptive power of love and friendship in an intoxicating story of art and ambition, guilt and forgiveness, travel and empire in the 19th century Middle East. In 1860, Thomas Hudson towers over the New York art world, an artist celebrated for paintings glowing with the power of American nature. By 1868, the death of his children and new tastes in art collecting haunt the corners of his studio. Searching for forgiveness and inspiration, he travels from New York to Paris to see the new wave of French painting and meet a renowned Parisian Orientalist painter, and then onward to Alexandria, Beirut, Jerusalem, and the ancient city of Petra where he expects to revive his fame with stunning, exotic paintings. In the caravan are a devious American entrepreneur, a sympathetic Oxford don, and a spirited English noblewoman married to a Bedouin sheikh. Hudson's journey across a vast map of desire, frustration, danger, and discovery illuminates the past and present.