Tour Stop & Giveaway: Tamanrasset by Edward Parr

 

Discover the newest book book by Edward Parr, Tamanasset, today and make sure to tenter the tour wide giveaway as the the author is awarding One randomly chosen winner via rafflecopter will win a $25 Amazon/BN.com gift card. The tour is sponsored by Goddess Fish Promotions and you can find all the tour stops HERE.

Talking with author Edward Parr:

Do you have any tattoos?  Where? When did you get it/them? Where are they on your body?

I’ve always felt that a tattoo was an expression of one’s self that was, more or less, a permanent statement, and in all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I was sufficiently permanent enough in any one persona to justify getting a tattoo. So, no, I have not yet gotten one. But if I had to get a tattoo right now, it would probably be the names and birthdates of my two children who now and will always inspire me every day.

How long have you been writing?

I started writing plays for the stage when I was an undergraduate student at New York University in the 1980’s and experimented in avant garde theater with artists like Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater. I staged many of my own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex, before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. I returned to writing in the 2010’s to indulge my creative desires and my interest in narrative forms and language, inspired by writers like Bernard Cornwell, Philippa Gregory and Patrick O’Brian. My first trilogy of novels, a series entitled Kingdoms Fall, was a World War One espionage adventure.

Is writing today anything like it was forty years ago?

The biggest difference in writing now compared to when I was writing plays in the 1980’s is the extent of information available at your fingertips. I can’t travel to the city of Vienna in the year 1905, but I can now instantly summon all sorts of photos, written memoirs, and antique travel guides, and I can drop a little yellow Pegman down in Google Maps and look around inside surviving locations all around the globe. I’ve ordered books from foreign countries and watched videos recorded in amazing locations. There is an incredible wealth of knowledge from the past available to those who wish to look.

What advice would you give a new writer just starting out?

I wish I could give a new writer the keys to becoming a commercial success, but I think that’s becoming harder than ever. There are so many books being written by new authors, great and not so great, and at the same time marketplaces are being flooded with AI-generated nonsense. What I would tell every new writer is to focus on what interests you, write the story you want to read, make it as good as you can, and put it out there. You can use the internet to sell a book around the world, so just write and worry about finding readers later on.

Tell us something about your newest release that is NOT in the blurb.

When I was writing my first trilogy of novels, I very intentionally wrote three books each with ten chapters, which I thought would translate well into a three-season television series with ten episodes per season. I didn’t sell it, though. When I began thinking about my newest novel, Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad, I had a fairly grand plan in mind for the story and sweeping arc of several years. I finally decided to use a five act story structure derived from the plays of William Shakespeare. In this structure, everything kind of builds up to the protagonist’s moment of crisis. Think of Hamlet’s moment of crisis: “To be or not to be, that is the question”. In my new novel there are four main characters, but they all reach a moment of utter isolation and loss in about the middle of the novel, and what happens next, well, that all flows from their alienation. Anyway, I thought that the five act structure was perfect for the novel I wanted to write.

 

TAMANRASSET
Edward Parr

GENRE:  Historical Fiction

TAMANRASSET is historical fiction set on the edge of the Sahara as the ancient world begins to fade and great empires collide. Four strangers—a mature Foreign Legionnaire, a Sharif’s wrathful son, an ambitious American archaeologist, and an abandoned Swedish widow—become adrift and isolated, but when their paths intersect, the fragile connections between them tell a story of survival and fate on the edge of the abyss. Blending the sweep of classic adventure with the horror of a great historical calamities, Edward Parr’s TAMANRASSET is a saga about the crossroads where nomads meet.

 Buy Links:

Amazon: https://a.co/d/44XsoJU

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tamanrasset-edward-parr/1148255148

Excerpt Three:

 The Basilica of Douïmès was quite a lovely site (and fairly peaceful considering the dozen native workmen who were lazily taking measurements and digging pilot holes at Ren’s direction) yet it was not a place for great discoveries. Ren thought about the Byzantine necropolis behind the basilica which seemed such a promising site; unfortunately, Père Delattre had reserved it for his own excavations. Ren wondered how much it would cost to drain the flooded marsh in the Salammbô district nearby where the Temple of Tanit was rumored to be located. As he walked about and reviewed the work of the diggers, Ren became increasingly irritated. Ordinarily, he thought, the Tunisian diggers preferred to do anything but work–they showed a greater interest than the professors in the minutest fragment of pottery and would stand around listening in awe to an academic discussion of a thing they’d never heard of before. Their picks moved with a balletic slowness of motion intended to keep even the most delicate relic safe from harm. Ren had to remind himself again that he was lucky to have earned this position: He had no surviving family, his father had been no one of importance, he had been raised on money left for him in trust. He was lucky to have ended up in England after being orphaned, lucky to have worked with Petrie in Egypt, and lucky to be in Carthage. Nevertheless, he chafed at Delattre’s pedantry and the slow pace of the work.

 

© 2025 by Edward Parr and Edwardian Press (New Orleans, Louisiana)

 

https://kingsumo.com/g/3q5vpg3/tamanrasset

AUTHOR Bio and Links: 

Edward (“Ted”) Parr studied playwriting at New York University in the 1980’s, worked with artists Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and staged his own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. He published his Kingdoms Fall trilogy of World War One espionage adventure novels which were collectively awarded Best First Novel and Best Historical Fiction Novel by Literary Classics in 2016. He has always had a strong interest in expanding narrative forms, and in his novel writing, he explores older genres of fiction (like the pulp fiction French Foreign Legion adventures or early espionage fiction) as inspiration to examine historical periods of transformation. His main writing inspirations are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bernard Cornwell, Georges Surdez, and Patrick O’Brien.

 

Socials: 

Website: https://edwardparrbooks.com/

 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-parr-5808b15/

 

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7369165.Edward_Parr

 

Amazon Author: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Edward-Parr/author/B00GACO3NC?ccs_id=a023fe74-dd9a-429f-b56a-5cfe148dafc5

 

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/DryCar9119AB/

 

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