Books set in the Middle East / Books about Expats

Hi,

I'm moving to the Middle East this year, was wondering if you could recommend any of the following:
1) Books set in the Middle East
2) Books about expatriates.

Cheers

Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Some people think it's a masterpiece. Other people, like myself, think it's a load of pretension toss.

Eothen by Kinglake.

Paul Bowles of course! Expat extraordinaire. "The Sheltering Sky" is soooo good...bleak, but worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles


Don't pass up Naguib Mahfouz! His Cairo Trilogy is on my short list of readings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naguib_Mahfouz

Olivia Manning - The Levant Trilogy - sequel to The Balkan Trilogy. In the first three books the heroine and her impossible husband are in Romania at the start of World War 2 and escape to Alexandria for the second trilogy.

Muriel Spark - The Mandelbaum Gate - set around Jerusalem in the 60s.

Which bit of the Middle East did you have in mind? It's a big place.

"Arabian Sands"by Wilfred Thesiger. Thesiger was one of the last great British explorers. He was the first European to explore the empty southern section of the Arabian desert -- which had never been mapped or explored as recently as the 1950s. He wrote a book about it, and this is it.

Thesiger was a good writer. He was a friend of Gavin Maxwell also a good writer who wrote A Reed Shaken by the Wind (Biblical allusion) about the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq. Dated now but still interesting.