Blood and Sand

Egypt, 1807. Thomas Keith, a Scottish soldier of the 78th Highlanders, is captured during Britain’s failed Alexandria expedition. Rather than return immediately to an army that has little place for him, he enters the service of Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian forces, learns the discipline of desert campaigning and converts to Islam. His new allegiance draws him into a political and military culture very different from the one he left.

Keith rises through the army during the Egyptian campaign against the first Saudi state in Arabia, eventually becoming governor of Medina. Sutcliff treats his transformation neither as simple desert romance nor betrayal, but as a sustained negotiation of faith, comradeship and identity. The novel is based on a documented soldier whose extraordinary career connected the Napoleonic conflict in Egypt with Ottoman efforts to recover the holy cities.