The Visitors by Sally Beauman

The Visitors by Sally Beauman

Based on a true story of discovery, The Visitors is New York Times bestselling author Sally Beauman's brilliant recreation of the hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings--a dazzling blend of fact and fiction that brings to life a lost world of exploration, adventure, and danger, and the audacious men willing to sacrifice everything to find a lost treasure.

In 1922, when eleven year-old Lucy is sent to Egypt to recuperate from typhoid, she meets Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist. The friendship draws the impressionable young girl into the thrilling world of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, who are searching for the tomb of boy pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

A haunting tale of love and loss, The Visitors retells the legendary story of Carter and Carnarvon's hunt and their historical discovery, witnessed through the eyes of a vulnerable child whose fate becomes entangled in their dramatic quest. As events unfold, Lucy will discover the lengths some people will go to fulfill their deepest desires--and the lies that become the foundation of their lives.

Intensely atmospheric, The Visitors recalls the decadence of Egypt's aristocratic colonial society, and illuminates the obsessive, daring men willing to risk everything--even their sanity--to claim a piece of the ancient past. As fascinating today as it was nearly a century ago, the search for King Tut's tomb is made vivid and immediate in Sally Beauman's skilled hands. A dazzling feat of imagination, The Visitors is a majestic work of historical fiction.

Sally Beauman is a Cambridge University graduate who was born in Devon, England. She began her career as a critic and writer for New York magazine, and after returning to England, she continued to write for renowned journals in the United States and the United Kingdom. She was the inaugural recipient of the Catherine Pakenham Award for journalism in 1970, and she was appointed editor of Queen magazine at the age of twenty-four. Beauman worked as an arts editor for the Telegraph Magazine and wrote for the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Times. Her books, including the New York Times bestseller Destiny, have been translated into over twenty languages and are international bestsellers.

Beauman also wrote two nonfiction volumes about the Royal Shakespeare Company's history and work: The Royal Shakespeare Company's Centenary Performance of Henry V (edited by Beauman, with a foreword by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, 1976) and The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (1982). Beauman, who was seventy-one years old at the time of his death, died in 2016.