The reference to incest never goes anywhere. A hotelier states the despicable mother and offspring are sleeping with one another. The son at one point steals Port’s passport. The travellers run into a truly awful travelling mother and son, the Lyles. Prostitute-chasing Port has no such complex. She doesn’t really want to, but it seems inevitable. Kit, for her part, has a single liaison with their friend and travelling companion Tunner.

Port is having sex with local prostitutes and pining after the ones he doesn’t manage to get. The couple can sit together, alone, easily, chatter for hours, change in front of one another. What is gulf is, and why, is not explained.

Somewhere in their directionless lives a gulf in understanding has crept in. They have been married twelve years (though are repeatedly described as ‘young’, Kit as a ‘girl’ etc, making it hard to pin down their age), and their marriage is floundering. Kit is preoccupied with omens, which she reads in multiple daily interactions. Port is proud of being a traveller, eschewing the label ‘tourist’. At home everywhere and nowhere, the couple are spoilt, pretentious, insufferable. Independently wealthy, Port has chosen a life of drifting travel, interspersed with brief periods in New York, and his wife Kit has followed him, usually without complaint. Kit and Port Moresby (yes, like the capital of Papua New Guinea) are aimless Americans.

Sometimes this gulf between expectation and reality can deliver – I had imagined Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch as something quite different, but loved it – but in this case it didn’t. Like ‘The Yellow Birds’, another disappointment, there was a cavernous gulf between the story I was promised and what I actually read. Rarely have I been so disappointed and also, simultaneously, appalled by a book. The blurb’s promise of a dangerous journey to the Sahara by a husband and wife seeking to save their marriage was enticing, and I was lured by the postwar Algerian setting, too. I was musing on what to bring, since the world is your oyster when it comes to holiday reading, when, coincidentally, an email popped into my inbox, featuring a review of The Sheltering Sky duly prompted, I borrowed it from my local library.

The sheltering sky book review