By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Juliana Maio is in love with life and it shows in her debut novel City of the Sun.
She takes the reader back to the 1940s in a historical romance and sets her tale in Egypt during World War Two. As you read it and turn the pages, it’s easy to see a Hollywood movie following in the wake of this lush novel. I couldn’t put it down.
In a recent email interview with the author in Los Angeles, I asked Maio, how the novel came to be.
”The only thing I knew for certain when I started the decade-long journey of writing this novel was that I wanted to learn about the Jews of Egypt,” she told the San Diego Jewish World. “I began to read about Egypt’s history and became intensely curious about my own Egyptian Jewish roots. I wanted to understand them in their social, cultural and political context.”
For her debut novel, it’s North Africa in 1941 and Maio has really done her homework. Meet the refugees, soldiers, and spies who stream into Cairo and watch as the German Nazis conspire with an emerging Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to fuel the Egyptian people’s seething resentment against their British overlords.
It’s a bit of a history lesson and a love story combined.
“My target audience for my book is very wide,” Maio said. “I hope to inspire anyone who is interested in taking a romantic, thrilling journey in an exotic land. Anyone interested in Jewish understanding or in the Middle East.”
The story goes like this: An American journalist in Cairo has a covert mission, maybe even a CIA operation: infiltrate the Arab city’s thriving Jewish community and locate a refugee nuclear scientist who could be key to America’s new weapons program. There’s race on to find the man, but the reporter isn’t the only one on his trail. There’s dozens of other people looking for him, too. They want him — badly.
If you’ve ever seen the Humphrey Bogart / Ingrid Bergman classic Casablanca, you might have a sense of what Maio has created here on the printed page.
Her novel is both ambitious (in a good sense of the world) and timely. The Middle East is still in the news every day in 2014 and not all that much has changed.
Maio practices entertainment law in Los Angeles and has worked at Triumph Films, a joint venture between Columbia Pictures and Gaumont Films. So she knows the movie business like the back of her hand, and her novel seems written as a movie treatment as well as a real page turner.
Based in Los Angeles. Maio seems to be in the perfect place to see her book becomes a screenplay.
Her own background led her to write this book, she said. Born in a Jewish family in Egypt but expelled from the country with her family during the Suez Crisis of 1956, Maio grew up in France and later came to the United States. So her novel comes right out of her own life in many ways and she knows directly of what she writes.
City of the Sun is a book about the sun, about love and about the darkness that evil sometimes brings into this fragile world.
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Bloom, a freelance writer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com