The Lost Tribe
This powerful first novel tells the story of David Mather, a charismatic relief worker who believes that a mysterious group of African nomads are the descendants of the legendary Lost Tribes of Israel. Mather organizes An expedition to find the tribe; it includes an anthropologist, an African shaman; and Ben Chase, the young journalist who is the book's narrator. Traveling north through a chaotic, war-torn country, these modern pilgrims encounter soldiers and guerrillas, a deranged family or neo-colonials, and a city ravaged by an unexplained plague. As they search for the elusive veiled tribe, Chase must deal with Mather's apocalyptic vision and his own changing perception of this dangerous world. Written with the pace of an adventure tale,The Lost Tribe is a complex exploration of the uncertain borderland between faith and despair.
Mark Lee
Mark W. Lee is an American novelist, poet and playwright. He has worked as a war correspondent and some of these real-life experiences have appeared in The Lost Tribe and in his second novel, The Canal House. Lee was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Yale University where he became friends with the Pulitzer prize winning poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren. Lee dedicatedThe Lost Tribe to Warren. After graduating from Yale, Lee lived in New York City for several years where he worked as a taxi driver and security guard. His poetry and nonfiction appeared in theAtlantic Monthly, the Times Literary Supplement and a variety of literary journals. In the1980s, Lee traveled to East Africa where he worked as a foreign correspondent for theLondon Daily Telegraph. During the brutal civil war that followed the fall of dictator Idi Amin, he was one of the few western journalists living in Uganda. Reporting on the poaching of elephants on the northern Ugandan border, Lee was almost killed by Sudanese soldiers. After being expelled from Uganda for writing about military atrocities, Lee returned to the United States. He found that he could no longer write poetry and began writing plays and novels.
