It’s never too late to fulfill a promise
Local author pens his first novel at age 85
By Deb Risden
Sami Hajjar’s wife, Felicity, was a literature major in college and a professional librarian. She was a “bookworm,” known to read three novels a week. Hajjar said when their children were young, she read them stories before bedtime and then she asked him to tell the kids a story — and he did.
“When the children became older, she’d always say, ‘Tell me a story.’ I told her one day I’d write her a story, a book,” Hajjar said.
Hajjar’s wife has since passed away, but he never forgot his promise.
As an avid swimmer, Hajjar started imagining a story while swimming. For two years, he would return home after his daily swim and write down notes from what he thought about that morning. “It took me eight months to then condense the notes, write and edit the story,” he said.
After the book was written, he wanted to know if an American reader could relate to it. He asked several friends and family members to read the book and weigh in on it before he sent it to a few publishers. He asked people from different walks of life to read the book: a psychologist, an English teacher, an author, a physician, a truck driver and his librarian daughter.
The Desert Shark and The Orcas was published by Europe Books July 2025 when Hajjar was 85 years old.
The setting for the story is a fictitious island country in the Arabian Gulf during the Gulf War.
“The title is a euphemism of the characters in the book. The shark is a predator, and the orcas are killer whales,” Haijar said. “Right there in the title you can see a conflict. As a swimmer, it was natural for me to think of the aquatic environment.”
It was also natural for Hajjar to incorporate his knowledge of the Middle East in the setting for the story.
Hajjar is a Lebanese American who came to the United States as a young man in his early 20s to attend graduate school at the University of Missouri. After earning his doctorate in political science, he taught at the University of Wyoming for 21 years. He left there to take a position as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, working for nearly 10 years in places that included Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Washington, D.C.
He left the Foreign Service when they wanted to post him in Nigeria. “When I married my wife, she told me, ‘I come with cats.’ And at that time, you were not allowed to take pets,” Hajjar said. “My wife said she wouldn’t go without her cats, but I could go by myself. So, I resigned from the Foreign Service because of cats. That is insane!”
Hajjar then went to work for the Army War College as the director of Middle East Studies, teaching national security and strategy from 1994 to 2002, when he retired. He said the Army War College is for senior officers, such as colonels, to study in preparation for and in hopes of moving up the ranks to become a general.
He and his wife eventually settled in Peyton in 2015 to be closer to two of their adult children and their families that live in the Colorado Springs area; the third lives in Arizona. He has three grandsons.
The story setting is a research think tank with the “shark” character as the director of the group gathered to study national security.
Fast forward to sharks and orcas. The story setting is a research think tank with the “shark” character as the director of the group gathered to study national security.
The book is written in three parts.
The first part is what happened and where: a dead body — the “shark” — was found in a car that went off a sand dune.
Part two answers why it happened. The young detective assigned to the case conducts a series of interviews with each one of the “orcas.” The interviews go back to 20 years earlier when they worked with the shark; each one had a motive. Hajjar describes the shark as a narcissistic person. “On the outside, he was extremely handsome, and women were drawn to him. He was suave and smooth talking, but on the inside, he was a monster,” he said.
Hajjar said the third part is full of surprises and twists in the story. It is not until the epilog when the reader learns the ending in an unexpected way.
Considering the setting, it should be no surprise that the reader will learn a lot about the history of the Gulf War and the Middle East. Beyond that, Hajjar describes it as “a story with deep meanings about different cultures, politics, leadership and organizations; hate, love, psychology and conflict. It raises ethical questions like if you did something wrong, should you be able to get away with it.”
Hajjar sums it up by saying the book is not for a young reader but for a more mature one. “You will learn something if you read this book with an open mind,” he said.
What’s next for 86-year-old Hajjar? Will there be a sequel? “I want to see the reaction to this book first. If it gets good reviews, it does lend itself to a sequel,” he said. And with a smile, he said, “I did that on purpose.”
Meanwhile, the book is not yet widely available in the U.S. The publisher is working through distribution challenges and plans to make it available in the near future. It can be purchased through Amazon Canada, and there are a few copies available at Poor Richards in downtown Colorado Springs.
Sami Hajjar’s first book of fiction is about characters that have commonalities with ocean predators, brought together for a think tank during the Gulf War, where the death of the “shark” takes place.
Sami Hajjar, a resident of Peyton since 2015, wrote and published his first novel several years after retiring from careers as a college professor, a U.S. Foreign Service officer and the director of Middle East Studies for the Army War College.
