Snuggle up for the most informative, least intrusive and safest international travel adventure ever—A roman à clef in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Roman à clef?

A roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”) is a book that tells a real-life story or depicts real people using fictional names, places, and altered events. The “key” is the real-world connection. In my series The Landscape Architect, the key is the geography, the landscape which dominates the story. In addition to the landscape key, I used creative freedom to layer-in Thurberesque character interaction.

Why? …a long story; but here’s the short form.

When I was only an impressionable 17, my father moved us from the US to Belgium. While he was working there, he took us all to London West End on a weekend break. Before he and my mom went to a play, they dropped me off at the Metropole Cinema to watch David Lean’s unforgettable Lawrence of Arabia… and its blazing red Arabian dawn mystical power has ever since driven my life.  That was the beginning of how landscape became the key for all my romans à clef in The Landscape Architect series.

What follows is in the news now—a story about Yenbo Saudi Arabia. Yenbo, Yanbu—don’t trouble yourself with spellings. Transliteration between Arabic and Roman alphabets is always a moving target. The third book in my series, The Landscape Architect, is titled Yenbo Palms. Read it and learn some inside stuff about the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, the Yenbo of Lawrence of Arabia, the Yenbo of Christopher Janus (CJ), the Yenbo of the trans-Arabia oil pipeline in this weekend’s news.

Yenbo Palms QR link to Amazon.