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THE COMFORT OF WOMEN
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THE COMFORT OF WOMEN

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The Comfort of Women is the diary of a newly-appointed Lecturer in Arabic at Cambridge University whose parents die within a few days of each other shortly after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. Shocked into an obsession with his amorous past, he attempts to locate the women he once knew, with mixed success. In a series of picaresque adventures across England and Scotland, David Quitregard (family motto 'Look Away') seeks, finds, wins, loses and contemplates the women of his Arabian dreams. His wanderings and his crisis, as a man of our time in a maelstrom of conflicting values, are at once touching and wildly funny.

In his career he sets out to teach the writings of poets, novelists and short-story writers from the pre-Islamic Imr al-Qais to the twentieth-century Naguib Mahfouz, and these figures haunt the narrative, as does the shadowy, obsessive Shahrazad, symbolised by a beauty in Quitregard's own class, from the cornucopia of tales we know as The Arabian Nights. DQ relives in his mind and in his life erotic adventures, hoaxes, dangers and infidelities in pursuit of the mistresses real or imaginary from his past, in Cambridge, an Essex village, Glasgow, and Bath.

Capable of a number of deep but temporary emotional attachments, DQ is totally unable to maintain a permanent but shallow relationship. His quandary is that society values fidelity in marriage, which Q finds frustrating as he values infidelity and ecstasy. DQ is tall, handsome, 28, candid, and affectionate with 'other women' to the point of adoration. Disquietingly, in the 21st century, he might equally become a comfort to them.

Philip Ward has lived in Libya as librarian, poet, playwright and travel-writer, in Malta as poet and travel-writer, in Egypt as an international library consultant and poet, and in Indonesia as Director of the National Library Service Project. He has also spent extended periods in China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Albania, Bulgaria (the subject of a travel trilogy), and most recently India.

Of his previous novel, set in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Forgotten Games, Andrew Sinclair wrote in The Times: "Brilliant in concept, written in prose as spare, lush and pointed as a cactus garden, Forgotten Games is as powerful and evocative as a rational nightmare, a logical daydream ... a singular book that fascinates and compels".

Novel with numerous illustrations 200 pages


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