The Desert Between Us

"A historical love story about the American West and the need for human connections... Most appealing for the scenery it captures, the book devotes paragraphs to the magnificence of the Nevada countryside. It captures big skies and scorching deserts as its characters wage an unwinnable struggle against nature. A subplot related to the real-life introduction of Arabian camels to the American Southwest involves considerable detail about how the plan worked—and didn’t. The book’s intentional fusion of the culture of the American West with the desert life of the Arabian Peninsula is a point of interest."

~Foreword Reviews

Barber’s exquisite prose captures the beauty and the grandeur of the arid red rock country as well as Sophia’s longing for human connection and her struggle with duty and desire. Geoffrey Scott reminds her of how love can change a person and her world, and the camel takes it all in, placidly watching—as immovable as the desert.

~Michele Morris, author of The Cowboy Life

The Desert Between Us tells a unique story about a small corner of American history which hasn’t had much light shed on it—and it involves a camel in the American West and The Great Wagon Road origins of Route 66, no less!  Phyllis Barber’s words are poetry, and she deftly conveys the hopes and yearnings of a young Englishwoman who has joined the Mormons in Utah, entered into a polygamous marriage, and then finds herself transplanted hundreds of miles away to a small and inhospitable settlement in the desert.  Her struggle to keep her young idealism healthy and vibrant in the dry, unforgiving desert is soul-stirring.  It is a story of love and passions that are sometimes in conflict with a strong sense of duty and commitment to a larger cause.  Phyllis Barber manages to convey the fragile and delicate beauty of the desert landscape in a manner that is evocative and transcendent, and then contrasts that beauty with the harshness and despair of that forbidding land.

~Kathy Gold, artist