Mali, WEST AFRICA

Saffron Skies, like Sundowners, is partly set in Africa. This time, it's Mali, the seventh-largest country in Africa, an enormous, hauntingly beautiful country that stretches from the Sahara in the north to the rocky escarpment of the Dogon in the south. A former French colony, it was also home to several of West Africa's most famous empires over the past five hundred years and its most famous city, Timbuctoo, was for centuries one of the world's most important centres of learning. Max Sall, the wealthy financier at the heart of Saffron Skies, sends his journalist daughter Amber to Mali to find out morel...

Extract from Saffron Skies:

     The road out of Timbuctoo could hardly be called one. It was little more than two dusty tracks in the shifting sand. Amber felt the wheels of the vehicle shudder as they tried to bite into the soft, sandy surface below. The landscape around them was creamy white, undulating hills interspersed with dark green shrubs and small bushes struggling to survive in the arid sand. Through the feathery leaves of the shrubs, she caught glimpses of the far-off dunes – they rose, seemingly solid and majestic, like giant crescents left casually behind by some celestial artist in perfect, half-moon shapes. It was almost 11:00 am and the sun was rising to its highest peak. Slowly the colours of the land began to shift from grey-white to pure white, all colour bleached out by the merging overhead of the sand and sky.