"All men dream, but not equally," wrote Lawrence of Arabia. "Those who dream at night awaken to find it vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men..."
Still reeling from the Great War and the Great Influenza of 1919, 40-year-old schoolteacher Agnes Shanklin has inherited just enough money to allow her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. There she meets T. E. Lawrence and Karl Weilbacher, the charming German spy who has shadowed Lawrence since his days as an archaeologist at Carchemich before the war. Telling her own story of late-life romance, Agnes finds herself drawn into geopolitical decisions that echo in our lives to this day.
Mary Doria Russell's fourth novel, DREAMERS OF THE DAY, takes us behind the scenes at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference when Winston Churchill, Lady Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence himself invented the modern Middle East.