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Of Sea and Sand: A Novel
Gabriel Sherlock arrives in Oman in 1982, fleeing shame and disaster back home in Ireland, and begins an intense affair with a woman whom no one else has seen. Locals insist she must be one of the jinn—a supernatural being—but Gabriel refuses to buy into the folklore, despite her sudden, unexplained disappearance.
Twenty-six years later, Irishwoman Thea Kerrigan lands in Muscat, chasing her own ghosts from the past, and is approached by Gabriel, who believes she is his lost lover. Certain that they have never met before, Thea is nonetheless drawn to this deluded, and perhaps dangerous, stranger and the rumors that surround him.
“Sometimes, the sunniest settings have the darkest shadows. Of Sea and Sand takes you to such a place, plays tricks with light and time—and leaves you not knowing who is Us, or Them? Fictional angels and vampires have had their time. Now it’s the turn of the jinn."--Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
Twenty-six years later, Irishwoman Thea Kerrigan lands in Muscat, chasing her own ghosts from the past, and is approached by Gabriel, who believes she is his lost lover. Certain that they have never met before, Thea is nonetheless drawn to this deluded, and perhaps dangerous, stranger and the rumors that surround him.
“Sometimes, the sunniest settings have the darkest shadows. Of Sea and Sand takes you to such a place, plays tricks with light and time—and leaves you not knowing who is Us, or Them? Fictional angels and vampires have had their time. Now it’s the turn of the jinn."--Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
- GenresFiction
317 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 30, 2018
6 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
About the author
Denyse Woods
5 books9 followersDenyse Woods, who also writes as Denyse Devlin, was born in Boston in 1958 and is the daughter of an Irish diplomat. As a result of that, and of her career as a translator in the Middle East, she has travelled extensively and had many homes around the world. In 1987 she settled in Co. Cork with her husband. They have two teenage daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 28, 2020
4.5 stars. Recommended.
All my life I've listened to people share the stories about jinn that were passed on to them from people in their social circle, often older family members who claimed to have seen them. There's a very specific religious and cultural context to the jinn, and as a Muslim it's been disheartening to see these supernatural beings animated and distorted to be served to a western audience, often in books that are YA or fantasy. OF SEA AND SAND is that rare book that presents an authentic, well-researched perspective of the jinn as we perceive them in the gulf region. The story captures the perfect balance of reality and supernatural forces that intermingle in our world. Many times we experience something that we cannot explain by logic or reason, so we reach for the unseen world and the influences it has on our world.
There are three major sections in this novel that follow two main characters. The story begins from Gabriel's perspective. From the start we know that Gabriel has arrived in Muscat, Oman, to escape from society in Ireland. Gabriel has done something that has brought shame to his family and turned him into an outcast in his own homeland. We get snippets of what that might be, especially from the way he's treated by his sister Annie who lives in Muscat, but we never really find out the exact details for most of the novel. Having read the story I'd say the specific details aren't important, but Gabriel's shame and isolation is. He's a broken man in many ways, so there's an opening in Gabriel, like a wound and perhaps that lets in the supernatural experiences that happen to him. In the first section, Gabriel starts a love affair with a woman that no one else can see. The people around him believe that his lover is a jinn, since she only appears to Gabriel, even when he's with other people. After all, there are stories of men who marry and start a family with jinnis. But then his lover disappears.
In the second section we follow an Irishwoman, Thea. She's arrived in Baghdad to work for a company - her impulse for adventure brings her to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a place where the locals and foreigners work together but don't cross those boundaries socially. Thea's time is mostly divided between the office and the hotel where she lives with a few other staff members, including an American woman Kim. Thea finds herself drawn to the hotel manager and receptionist Sachdiv, an Indian man who grew up in Oman and now lives in Iraq with his wife and children. An unknown illness takes Thea out of Baghdad.
The third section, which is divided into a couple of smaller sections, takes place over two decades later, closer to our time today. Gabriel and Thea's paths cross in Muscat and he believes that she's his mysterious lover. In this section, the intermingling of reality and the unseen world of the jinn (or Irish fairies and folklore) solidify and a shape begins to take hold.
This was a brilliant novel to read. Denyse Woods approaches the story with a formal and literary style of omniscient narrative that was very different to what I'm used to reading in contemporary novels. The narrative style relies on details of place and characters that paint a vivid picture of the reality that the characters are experiencing, and these details in turn make fiction seem real. The story, while very much being inspired by and engaged with the supernatural world, is rooted in a realistic and vivid setting. Most of the story takes place in the Arab world, Oman and Iraq, with the former being more prominent. Woods paints a beautiful and layered picture of Muscat, from its deserts, towns and cities to the people who live there, focusing primarily on European foreigners and the locals and natives who flit in and out the picture around them. I loved this and I loved the strong sense of landscape in the story. You can properly imagine the deserts of Oman and Iraq, from the caves and mountains to the dunes and dusty winds. Woods brings her Irish and western perspective to Arabia, setting down characters from her world into a world that has mysteries and traditions that are at once distinct and familiar to Irish culture. The characters draw parallels between the Arabian jinns and the Irish fairies and folklore, educating the reader about the similarities that exist between these two distinct cultures. From the tiniest shifts in emotions and experiences of daily life, to larger concerns of belief and community, Gabriel and Thea are distinct voices in the novel. Their stories converge in a way that was fascinating but at the same time gives space to the reader to make up our own minds about what might be happening.
Overall, I loved this book and would recommend if you're looking for a story set in the Arab world that has an authentic and thoroughly researched portrayal of the jinn and how their communities may interact with our living world. In our Muslim tradition we believe the jinn are beings that God created from the fire and we believe they are real. We grew up listening to stories of hauntings and unusual alliances of power and love, so the way Woods treated the supernatural in her novel was believable and brought new theories to mind about how one may explain the inexplicable. I wasn't expecting the turn that the story took and read most of the second half in one sitting. I think this novel is best experienced in as few sittings as possible. There were parts where I struggled to pay attention, sometimes it felt more detailed than I could appreciate in the moment, but the overall arc of the narrative was a wonderful swoop that connected the Arab and the western worlds.
An underrated novel that was a delight to read.
All my life I've listened to people share the stories about jinn that were passed on to them from people in their social circle, often older family members who claimed to have seen them. There's a very specific religious and cultural context to the jinn, and as a Muslim it's been disheartening to see these supernatural beings animated and distorted to be served to a western audience, often in books that are YA or fantasy. OF SEA AND SAND is that rare book that presents an authentic, well-researched perspective of the jinn as we perceive them in the gulf region. The story captures the perfect balance of reality and supernatural forces that intermingle in our world. Many times we experience something that we cannot explain by logic or reason, so we reach for the unseen world and the influences it has on our world.
There are three major sections in this novel that follow two main characters. The story begins from Gabriel's perspective. From the start we know that Gabriel has arrived in Muscat, Oman, to escape from society in Ireland. Gabriel has done something that has brought shame to his family and turned him into an outcast in his own homeland. We get snippets of what that might be, especially from the way he's treated by his sister Annie who lives in Muscat, but we never really find out the exact details for most of the novel. Having read the story I'd say the specific details aren't important, but Gabriel's shame and isolation is. He's a broken man in many ways, so there's an opening in Gabriel, like a wound and perhaps that lets in the supernatural experiences that happen to him. In the first section, Gabriel starts a love affair with a woman that no one else can see. The people around him believe that his lover is a jinn, since she only appears to Gabriel, even when he's with other people. After all, there are stories of men who marry and start a family with jinnis. But then his lover disappears.
In the second section we follow an Irishwoman, Thea. She's arrived in Baghdad to work for a company - her impulse for adventure brings her to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a place where the locals and foreigners work together but don't cross those boundaries socially. Thea's time is mostly divided between the office and the hotel where she lives with a few other staff members, including an American woman Kim. Thea finds herself drawn to the hotel manager and receptionist Sachdiv, an Indian man who grew up in Oman and now lives in Iraq with his wife and children. An unknown illness takes Thea out of Baghdad.
The third section, which is divided into a couple of smaller sections, takes place over two decades later, closer to our time today. Gabriel and Thea's paths cross in Muscat and he believes that she's his mysterious lover. In this section, the intermingling of reality and the unseen world of the jinn (or Irish fairies and folklore) solidify and a shape begins to take hold.
This was a brilliant novel to read. Denyse Woods approaches the story with a formal and literary style of omniscient narrative that was very different to what I'm used to reading in contemporary novels. The narrative style relies on details of place and characters that paint a vivid picture of the reality that the characters are experiencing, and these details in turn make fiction seem real. The story, while very much being inspired by and engaged with the supernatural world, is rooted in a realistic and vivid setting. Most of the story takes place in the Arab world, Oman and Iraq, with the former being more prominent. Woods paints a beautiful and layered picture of Muscat, from its deserts, towns and cities to the people who live there, focusing primarily on European foreigners and the locals and natives who flit in and out the picture around them. I loved this and I loved the strong sense of landscape in the story. You can properly imagine the deserts of Oman and Iraq, from the caves and mountains to the dunes and dusty winds. Woods brings her Irish and western perspective to Arabia, setting down characters from her world into a world that has mysteries and traditions that are at once distinct and familiar to Irish culture. The characters draw parallels between the Arabian jinns and the Irish fairies and folklore, educating the reader about the similarities that exist between these two distinct cultures. From the tiniest shifts in emotions and experiences of daily life, to larger concerns of belief and community, Gabriel and Thea are distinct voices in the novel. Their stories converge in a way that was fascinating but at the same time gives space to the reader to make up our own minds about what might be happening.
Overall, I loved this book and would recommend if you're looking for a story set in the Arab world that has an authentic and thoroughly researched portrayal of the jinn and how their communities may interact with our living world. In our Muslim tradition we believe the jinn are beings that God created from the fire and we believe they are real. We grew up listening to stories of hauntings and unusual alliances of power and love, so the way Woods treated the supernatural in her novel was believable and brought new theories to mind about how one may explain the inexplicable. I wasn't expecting the turn that the story took and read most of the second half in one sitting. I think this novel is best experienced in as few sittings as possible. There were parts where I struggled to pay attention, sometimes it felt more detailed than I could appreciate in the moment, but the overall arc of the narrative was a wonderful swoop that connected the Arab and the western worlds.
An underrated novel that was a delight to read.
January 23, 2019
Novel set mainly in OMAN
4.5*
A book divided into 4 parts. The first part details the arrival of Gabriel in Oman to stay with his sister Annie. It is the 1980s, a period when tourism was unknown in the country. He is escaping the consequences of his actions back in Ireland. There is quite some backstory in this family and it all has to do with Max, his older brother. Unconscious sibling rivalry perhaps but the trauma he has left behind has affected the family members and a much wider circle. The mystery of his actions is revealed at the end of the book.
Essentially Gabriel temporarily lives with Annie and her husband in a house where he senses a spirit, a jinnaya who comes to him and only he can see. I am not usually taken with stories that have other-worldly dimensions but the author is a naturally gifted writer who can weave a good and convincing story. To him the woman with whom he becomes intimately acquainted is as real as the next person, but no-one else can see or experience her. Jinns feature in the Quran and are embedded in Omani folklore and they can appear for all kinds of reasons. He names her Prudence.
The next person we meet in the second section is Thea who has taken a post in Iraq in the same period at the time of the Iran-Iraq war and despite the terrible circumstances she feels quite at home in Baghdad. She is tempted into a relationship with Sachiv but works on resisting a passion that is clearly burgeoning but largely unacknowledged between the two of them.
Parts three and four are set early 21st Century when Gabriel, now Jabril, and Thea meet and he is convinced that she is Prudence, the jinaya of his dreams. For him, of course Prudence has never been a dream but a reality that has sustained him for the last 25 years or so.
The first two parts work wonderfully, the writer is a very talented storyteller. The last two sections however, I felt, didn’t hold together quite as well as the first half. The characters began to richly develop early on but then lost a bit of credibility as Gabriel and Thea began to wrestle with the phenomenon of the jinn. There are, however, layers in the book that make it feel lucid and full of life and the writing is excellent.
I read this book whilst in The Empty Quarter, where some of the book is set and that made it a wonderful experience. Having just climbed several sand dunes I was intrigued to find the two of them camping out in the desert, which actually is a dangerous place. The Empty Quarter is an area of pure desert, larger than France, with more sand than the Sahara, which is 15x larger (according to the novel). In the novel there are pertinent mentions of Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands as he travelled through The Empty Quarter in the company of a Bedouin Tribe. He recorded how the dunes constantly shift and get reshaped by the winds and can move up to half a metre per day. Fascinating if you are actually watching this happen in front of your eyes!
The author talked to TripFiction about writing and location, do head over to our website; and if ever you need inspiration to visit a country, then this novel is excellent in terms of TripFiction and a good read. Oman should be firmly on your to-visit list!
4.5*
A book divided into 4 parts. The first part details the arrival of Gabriel in Oman to stay with his sister Annie. It is the 1980s, a period when tourism was unknown in the country. He is escaping the consequences of his actions back in Ireland. There is quite some backstory in this family and it all has to do with Max, his older brother. Unconscious sibling rivalry perhaps but the trauma he has left behind has affected the family members and a much wider circle. The mystery of his actions is revealed at the end of the book.
Essentially Gabriel temporarily lives with Annie and her husband in a house where he senses a spirit, a jinnaya who comes to him and only he can see. I am not usually taken with stories that have other-worldly dimensions but the author is a naturally gifted writer who can weave a good and convincing story. To him the woman with whom he becomes intimately acquainted is as real as the next person, but no-one else can see or experience her. Jinns feature in the Quran and are embedded in Omani folklore and they can appear for all kinds of reasons. He names her Prudence.
The next person we meet in the second section is Thea who has taken a post in Iraq in the same period at the time of the Iran-Iraq war and despite the terrible circumstances she feels quite at home in Baghdad. She is tempted into a relationship with Sachiv but works on resisting a passion that is clearly burgeoning but largely unacknowledged between the two of them.
Parts three and four are set early 21st Century when Gabriel, now Jabril, and Thea meet and he is convinced that she is Prudence, the jinaya of his dreams. For him, of course Prudence has never been a dream but a reality that has sustained him for the last 25 years or so.
The first two parts work wonderfully, the writer is a very talented storyteller. The last two sections however, I felt, didn’t hold together quite as well as the first half. The characters began to richly develop early on but then lost a bit of credibility as Gabriel and Thea began to wrestle with the phenomenon of the jinn. There are, however, layers in the book that make it feel lucid and full of life and the writing is excellent.
I read this book whilst in The Empty Quarter, where some of the book is set and that made it a wonderful experience. Having just climbed several sand dunes I was intrigued to find the two of them camping out in the desert, which actually is a dangerous place. The Empty Quarter is an area of pure desert, larger than France, with more sand than the Sahara, which is 15x larger (according to the novel). In the novel there are pertinent mentions of Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands as he travelled through The Empty Quarter in the company of a Bedouin Tribe. He recorded how the dunes constantly shift and get reshaped by the winds and can move up to half a metre per day. Fascinating if you are actually watching this happen in front of your eyes!
The author talked to TripFiction about writing and location, do head over to our website; and if ever you need inspiration to visit a country, then this novel is excellent in terms of TripFiction and a good read. Oman should be firmly on your to-visit list!
March 29, 2021
This novel made me want to catch the first plane to Oman. Until that becomes possible, Of Sea and Sand is the best way to travel to this magical country.
September 8, 2018
An excellent story set in the Middle East with a mystical feel! I felt transported to Oman, Iraq and Ireland.
Would definitely recommend!
Would definitely recommend!
October 13, 2018
Of Sea and Sand is a mystical story that inspires a sense of anonymity. Woods creates an ambiguity between Irish Folklore and the dogma of Middle Eastern Jinn. Irish girl Thea Kerrigan meets Irish man Gabriel (Jibrill) Sherlock. Though this novel is place centred, the sense of place is not presented as fixed or static, but in flux due to a variety of forces. Woods depicts space as having a tangible physicality of its own and details an interweaving of human characters within their community and their landscape. Thea is pulled from war torn Baghdad to the calming and isolated waters of Sheep’s Head. Meanwhile, Gabriel hides away in shame in Oman, following a family disturbance. The accidental meeting in Muscat for Thea is tinged at first with regret of never finding her lost lover, Sachiv. Yet, for Gabriel, Thea is his lost love. The familiarity, although charming at times, becomes increasingly tense as it takes us into dark places and other worlds. The story blends the colours and smells of the suq with the Bedouin perception of magic. It demands a respect for the dangers that lurk in the desert, which depicts Nature as neither good nor evil. This story keeps one foot firmly in each parallel world by bringing a supernatural, dream like reality to the fore. The brevity and balance of the syntax, narrated by third-person omniscient, depicts human struggle, without melodrama. However, the quiet, anticlimactic conclusion is obscure and therefore this novel could be interpreted as being allegorical in content. Specific details are full of factuality and this is a fundamental device for Woods. Her success at using this technique lies in the way she uses these facts, which reassures our sense of the real world and every day values.
September 3, 2022
We are introduced to characters who lead us on a journey to Oman, Iraq and Ireland. Instead of the things we usually think of when the middle east is mentioned, like oilfield, camels and billionaire sheiks. Instead, we find the huge, hot and windy Arabia of dunes and vast endless desert spaces. The air is filled with wadis and souks and spices along with spirits of the liquid sort, and, it seems, spirits. of the ethereal type, better known in this world as a Jinn. Prudence is one very interesting jinn. She fades in and out of view in a very cinematic and mysterious blue aura. She is both physical and spiritual, normal and mysterious. It all turns out to be very mysterious. It’s a ghost story, a love story, and a mystery that keeps you guessing until the very end. It is always unpredictable and has a simply amazing ending. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have finished the last page. It’s not my normal genre, but I really did enjoy this story
February 11, 2021
I had originally picked up this novel because it takes place in Oman, a country I have visited numerous times and that I have grown to love. The vivid descriptions of the diverse Omani landscape will transport you back to this beautiful country. Although the plot is a bit slow in the beginning, overall it becomes a fascinating story of love, land, and jinn. The descriptions of Oman resonated with me; I am not certain that someone who has never been there will appreciate this novel in the same way.
February 27, 2021
It's been years since I read any of Denyse's books, and now I remember why I used to enjoy them so much. She takes me to places I have never been and am unlikely to ever travel to. I travel a lot, but I'm not very adventurous.
This is a gripping, emotional story, and beautifully written, as it needs to be because not much actually happens. With lesser writing skills, this novel could be boring, but this is an enjoyable read.
This is a gripping, emotional story, and beautifully written, as it needs to be because not much actually happens. With lesser writing skills, this novel could be boring, but this is an enjoyable read.
August 1, 2021
I just finished this book and i am so nervous and for god sake i don’t know why would any one choose such an ending rather than all the other available scenarios !!!
This was so bad and evil for real ..
I can’t stop regretting all the time and emotions I put in this book. Such a disappointement .
This was so bad and evil for real ..
I can’t stop regretting all the time and emotions I put in this book. Such a disappointement .
October 28, 2023
Not sure where theAuthor was going with this. The characters all seemed very selfish, open to adultery, the Kim character was actively encouraging the female lead to cheat on her Husband. Ending was too abrupt and no clarification.
August 14, 2022
Set in Oman and Iraq this is the story of two individuals inexplicably entwined.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews