Misadventure in the Middle East : Travels As a Tramp, Artist and Spy

Experience the beautifully written tale of a hapless young artist, a beat-up pick-up called Yasmine, and an extraordinary journey across the world. __Misadventure in the Middle East: Travels as Tramp, Artist and Spy__ by Henry Hemming creates a portrait of the post-9/11 Middle East that transports the reader into the human heart of the region. When Henry Hemming sets out in his pick-up truck to make a portrait of the Middle East, he has no idea what he will find or how he will live. Using art as his passport, he spends a year traveling throughout the area; his extraordinary journey finds him accused of being both an Islamic extremist and a British spy, dancing in a dervish hideaway and attending a Fourth of July party with GIs in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. As the young people he meets along the way share their dreams and doubts, Hemming discovers an unpredictable Middle East that is in no way accurately represented by the nightly news. And as the invasion of Iraq... When Henry Hemming set out in a pick-up truck called Yasmine to make a portrait of the Middle East, he had no idea what he would find or where he would be able to go - he wasn't even sure how he would earn enough money to stay on the road for a year. Henry Hemming's extraordinary journey takes him from the drug-fuelled ski-slopes of Iran via some of the region's secret beaches, palaces, army barracks, police cells, nightclubs, torture chambers, brothels and artists' studios to a Fourth of July party with American GIs in one of Saddam's former palaces. Everywhere he goes his status as artist gets him into places he would not have been allowed otherwise. As the invasion of Iraq intensifies, he realises that to finish his portrait of the region he must go to Baghdad and find the artistic renaissance there that he has heard about. In so doing he will risk his life. Throughout, he meets young people who share their dreams, doubts and passions, revealing a young and unpredictable Middle East that flies beneath the radar of nightly news bulletins. In these meetings, he also begins to understand what he himself represents, be it British spy, Muslim extremist, jihadi, tramp, bohemian, street-cleaner, Baghdadi, or, from time to time, artist. "Misadventure in the Middle East" offers a unique, evocative and highly original account of his journey.