Chaucer on the Nile

Chaucer Jeffries is a college student and developing writer who wants to be "the kind of person on whom nothing is lost." On a study-abroad trip in Egypt just before the Mubarak regime implodes, he has been training his attention on international business and the tourist scene in Cairo and along the Nile, when he blunders into a terrorist plot-and the results are explosive. Overnight, Chaucer finds himself a 'person of interest' at the center of a web of international intrigue being spun by forces he cannot easily identify. Ultimately, these forces draw Chaucer's crew into a conflict between the leaders of two terrorist factions and the thuggish Amn al-Dawla-the government's internal security service-a conflict whose resolution hinges on one disaffected software programmer's desire and ability to do the right thing with what he knows. In the process of extricating himself and his friends from danger, Chaucer not only gains some practical knowledge of international business and international terrorism, but learns a bit about negotiating borders in love and friendship as well. Chaucer on the Nile is a tragicomic story, full of interesting characters, in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales, and a moral tale in the tradition of Dante's The Divine Comedy and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress-a work of immediate political and social relevance in our efforts to manage the tension between international competition and international community.