Diana Mayo is young, beautiful, wealthy--and independent. Bored by the eligible bachelors and endless parties of the English aristocracy, she arranges for a horseback trek through the Algerian desert. Two days into her adventure, Diana is kidnapped by the

The Sheik is a 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull, an English novelist of the early twentieth century. It was the first of a series of novels she wrote with desert settings that set off a major revival of the "desert romance" genre of romantic fiction. It was a huge best-seller and the most popular of her books, and it served as the basis for the film of the same name starring Rudolph Valentino in the title role.The novel opens in a hotel in the Algerian city of Biskra. A dance is being held, hosted by a young woman named Diana Mayo and her brother, Sir Aubrey Mayo. It transpires that Diana is planning to leave on a month-long trip into the desert, taking no one with her but an Arab guide. Nobody thinks this is a sensible idea, and Lady Conway-a real person who appears in the book as a minor character-disapprovingly attributes Diana's adventurous plan to her "scandalous" upbringing. Diana's mother had died giving birth to her and her father had killed himself from grief, with the result that Diana grew up tomboyish, with a freedom that at the time was normally only allowed to boys. Before Diana leaves on her journey, her independent character is further established when she refuses a proposal of marriage, explaining that she doesn't know what love is and doesn't want to know. Once she begins travelling in the desert, it is not long before she is kidnapped by the eponymous Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan. It turns out her guide had been bribed. Ahmed takes Diana to his tent and rapes her, an event that happens off stage, between the second and third chapters. Diana spends a few months as Ahmed's captive, being raped regularly and brooding on her hatred for him and her self-loathing. Eventually, she is allowed increasing liberty and starts going riding with Ahmed's valet, Gaston. One day, she manages to escape Gaston on one of these rides and gallops away. She is quickly recaptured by Ahmed, however, and as they are riding back to camp, she is overcome by the sudden realisation that she is in love with him. She knows she can say nothing of this, as Ahmed-who claims to find love dull-will send her away if he learns of her love.

"Pride and passion vie for supremacy in this steamy retelling of E.M. Hull's romance classic"--Page 4 of cover

Ahmed, The Son of the Sheik, falls in love with Yasmin, a dancer and the daughter of a renegade Frenchman who leads a troupe of mountebanks and thieves. When Ahmed is captured by Yasmin's father and held for ransom, he is led to believe that she has tricked him; and when freed he abducts her, taking her to a desert camp. He is about to force her to submit to him when his father, the sheik, barges into the tent and frees the girl. Later, Ahmed learns that it was not she but rather her jealous admirer who betrayed him. He follows Yasmin to a dancehall, where a bitter fight with knives takes place; Ahmed emerges victorious, unscathed and with the girl in his arms.

Sanagi loves nothing more than money—not even love. After all, it's what keeps her small family going. But when a chance encounter with a stranger leads her to push away his offer of riches, she wonders if she's gone crazy...and starts to believe she really has when he reveals that he's a Sheikh, and proposes to her! She rejects him, but soon finds out that a marriage with him might be the only way to keep her family safe...!

British writer Edith Maude Hull was best known for her classic romantic novel The Sheik which became an international best seller soon after its release. Originally published in 1921, The Shadow of the East is a classic romance of the Orient and was Hull's second novel.

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.