On the eve of the first Gulf War, an American poet drifts into Tunis-and into a world that refuses to stay ordinary. Dizzier Than Gillespie follows Delilah, a restless traveler and visiting professor, as she navigates friendship, feminism, spirituality, and danger in North Africa, guided (and occasionally derailed) by a scandalous thirteenth-century saint with a taste for gin and tonic.
Lyrical, witty, and fiercely intelligent, Sibyl James's debut novel blends political insight with magical realism, tracing women who claim space in male caf s, challenge orthodoxy, and invent joy in the shadow of war. This is a novel about sisterhood and resistance, exile and belonging-where jazz syncopation, desert light, and saintly mischief collide, and where home is found not on a map, but in the act of living fully.