'Harem' Author Offers 'Courtesan'
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 7/8/2002
Suggesting a specialty in lushly written and plotted novels about women in exotic times and places in the Mideast, Dora Levy Mossanen has now sold a second novel, Courtesan, to Scribner's Marcela Landres before her first, Harem, is even out. The North American rights sale was made by agent Loretta Barrett, who also reports she has sold both books in Germany at auction and has also sold Harem in France and Israel. The Israeli-born author, who has lived in Iran and now in California, tells the story in her new book of a French girl married to an Iranian diamond dealer; she becomes involved, after he is murdered, in a dark world of warlords and diamond merchants and eventually becomes a celebrated courtesan. Harem is out next month as Scribner's lead summer trade paperback original.
