Alexander McNabb

Alexander McNabb has been working in, living in and travelling around the Middle East for over 38 years. Formerly a journalist, editor and magazine publisher, today he is a consultant on media, publishing and digital communications.

Alexander's first serious novel was the critically acclaimed 'Olives - A Violent Romance', a work which explores the attitudes, perceptions and conflicts of the Middle East, exposing a European sensibility to the strange and multi-layered world of life on the borders of Palestine. The book triggered widespread controversy - and couldn't be sold in Jordan, where it was set - and yet found a receptive audience in the Middle East and beyond.

'Olives' was followed by international spy thriller 'Beirut - An Explosive Thriller'. His third Middle East-based novel, 'Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy' is about a ageing diplomat dying of cancer unearthing his even more deadly past. Together, the three novels form the 'Levant Cycle'.

Alexander's next book, 'A Decent Bomber' is set in Ireland and tells the story of a retired IRA bomb-maker forced to resume his old trade and pitches 'old terror' against 'new terror' in a battle of wits between an Irish farmer with a dubious past and Somali extortionists with a questionable future.

His next novel, 'Birdkill' is a psychological thriller based around a teacher who has lost her recent past to 'The Void', a terrible incident she can't recall and nobody seems to be in a hurry to tell her about. Her friend Mariam embarks on a race to uncover the truth before Robyn is driven over the edge into insanity.

Alexander's latest novel is 'The Dead Sea Hotel', set in a rundown hotel that suddenly finds itself home to murders, ghosts, international spies and their proxies as well as the devil and a few demons, who all go on to make a general mess of things. It's a satire that explores the pointless conflicts of the region, the proxies who enable their sponsors to make that mess worse and the locals who invariably get caught up in the middle of it all.