Published on the centenary of International Women’s Day 8 March 1910-2010.

Suez, 1949: Egypt’s struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs.

Great Britain, victorious but bankrupt after WWII, attempts to reassert itself as an Imperial power in the Suez Canal zone. Joe, an RAF sergeant, is the everyday working man, in whom racism and misogyny become a sickness. Ailsa, his wife, an independent, free-thinking woman, yearns to explore her new homeland of Egypt. It's here that she meets the exotic Mona. In a world of terrorism and political struggle, her friendship with Mona and an act of murder pitch the happily married couple into tragedy. Nia, looking back in late middle age, follows in her parents' wake to sail the Suez Canal. On this journey Nia will face difficult life lessons about love and betrayal.

"Into Suez is a bold and gripping novel on an important subject, with a beautifully handled double time frame, and some of Davies’s best prose yet. She writes so well about childhood, landscape, class, British social attitudes and Arab realities. The careful research never intrudes and always rings true. Her characters are rounded in time, grounded in place. A very satisfying and moving book."
'The best books under the sun: the finest selection of books for the summer', The Daily Telegraph

"Stevie Davies is one of our most consistent and continually undervalued writers whose unsentimental, quietly revelatory novels have cropped up on the Booker and Orange shortlists without ever quite converting to a major prize. Into Suez deserves to be the one that brings wider renown, as it presents the most fully realised fusion of her personal and political histories to date."
The Guardian

Stevie Davies was born in Swansea and spent a nomadic childhood in Egypt, Scotland and Germany. Her first novel Boy Blue (1987) won the Fawcett Society Book Prize. Closing the Book (1994) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Fawcett Society Book Prize. The Web of Belonging (1997) was dramatised for ITV by Alan Plater. Her eighth novel, The Element of Water (2001), was longlisted both for the Booker and the Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award for 2002; Stevie adapted it as a radio play for BBC Radio 4. Her ninth novel, Kith and Kin was longlisted for the Orange Prize.