Lords of the Atlas

Gavin Maxwell was born in the south-west of Scotland and was educated at a succession of schools before taking a degree in Estate Management at Oxford. He served with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, after which he bought the island of Soay. As well as his famous otter books - Ring of Bright Water and The Rocks Remain - he also wrote the critically acclaimed People of the Reeds, an account of the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. He died in 1969.

Lords of the Atlas is a classic story of Morocco and the rise and spectacular fall of the House of Glaoua. Madini and T'hami El Glaoui, sons of a Moroccan Caid by an Ethiopian concubine, rose meteorically to power in the almost medieval state of Morocco at the end of the nineteenth Century. This is the epic story of the more than fifty years in which they governed the country in barbaric, ostentatious splendor, until their spectacular downfall in 1956. Out of the intriguing and dramatic lives of Madair and T'hami, Gavin Maxwell has fashioned an epic story set against the superb background of Marrakesh and the pinnacled castles of the High Atlas, still magnificent as crumbling ruins. A dramatic history of intrigue, action, and exotic places, and illustrated with over one hundred color illustrations and photographs, Lords of the Atlas is a stunning look at the rise and fall of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating rulers. (8 X 9 3/4, 276 pages, color photos, b&w photos, map, illustrations)