Aiming to track down a small oasis city deep in the Sahara, a few of whose generous inhabitants found her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her house in the olive groves of Italy and cause along the south coast from the Mediterranean.

Going through Morocco and Algeria she eats pigeon pie with a family group of cannabis farmers, and learns about the practices of djinns; she encounters residents whose protest against the tyrannical Ruler Hassan takes the proper execution of attaching about A Handful of Honey: Apart to the Palm Groves of Morocco and Algeria colanders to their television aerials – a practice he soon outlaws – and results in a stone-age method of making olive-oil, still heading strong. She allows a ten-year-old to business lead her in to the fundamentalist strongholds from the suburbs of Algiers – where she makes an excellent friend.

Plunging southwards, regardless, into the desert, she at last shares a lunch time of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her aged friends, in a green and pleasurable hand grove perfumed by flowering henna: once, it seems, the favourite scent from the Prophet Mohammed. She discovers at journey’s end that life inside a date-farming oasis, haunting though its music may be, isn’t so simple and uncomplicated as she has imagined.

Annie Hawes provides legions of enthusiasts. Her writing gets the well-built flow of fiction and the self-effacing credibility of a journal.