Aiming to track downa small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean.

In Morocco and Algeria she shares pigeon pie with a family of cannabis farmers and learns about the habits of diinns; she encounters citizens whose protest against the authoritarian King HasSan takes the form of attaching colanders to their television aerials - a practice he soon outlaws - and comes across a Stone Age method of making olive oil. which is stilt going strong...and a ten-year-old leads her into the fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers, where she makes a good friend.

Aiming to track downa small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean.

In Morocco and Algeria she shares pigeon pie with a family of cannabis farmers and learns about the habits of diinns; she encounters citizens whose protest against the authoritarian King HasSan takes the form of attaching colanders to their television aerials - a practice he soon outlaws - and comes across a Stone Age method of making olive oil. which is stilt going strong...and a ten-year-old leads her into the fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers, where she makes a good friend.

Plunging southwards deep into the desert, she at last shares a lunch of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her old friends, in a green and pleasant palm grove perfumed by flowering henna - once, it seems, the favourite scent of the Prophet Mohammed.

And there she discovers, at journey's end, that life in a date-farming oasis, haunting though its songs maybe, is not so simple and uncomplicated as she has imagined.