Stephen Lewis talks to a York-based missionary whose first children's book is a fun-filled African adventure.

SOPHIE is a little girl in a very exotic place.

Her botanist dad has taken her with him to live on the southern edge of the Sahara desert.

The bustling little market town of Gorom-Gorom is full of colour and life.

One day, pushing her way through the market, Sophie haggles with a fat woman for a bunch of "the sweetest bananas in Africa", then stops for a moment to watch the snake charmer.

"The charmer, Salif dan Bari, was in full flow. Wrapped around his head was a long green turban, and wrapped around his arm was a long green snake. The snake glared at Sophie with its narrow yellow eyes."

Then she sees it - something even more extraordinary. An albino camel, "white from head to hump to hooves".

The camel belongs to Gidaado the Fourth, a little boy with a big name. He and Sophie become friends, and before you know it Gidaado has invited Sophie to come for a ride on his camel, named Chobbal, out into the great Sahara.

Sophie's dad has warned her about the dangers of the desert. But girls will be girls....

So begins Stephen Davies's entrancing adventure story, in which Sophie, Gidaado and Chobbal discover just how dangerous the desert is. There are snakes. There are djinns. And worst of all there is Moussa ag Litni - a murderous Tuareg bandit intent on stealing camels.

Sophie And The Albino Camel is missionary and journalist Stephen Davies's first children's book. It's a wonderfully light, humorous tale - but what really marks it out is the thrilling way it brings the Sahara and its people to life.

That should be no surpise. Because for the last five years, Stephen - whose parents Mark and Heather Davies live in Poppleton - has been working as a missionary in Burkina Fasso, on the southern edge of the Sahara.

It is, he says, an extraordinary place - the desert itself barren, painfully hot yet oddly beautiful, a landscape of sweeping sand dunes. "It gives you this feeling of extraordinary smallness," he says, while on a brief visit to York to see his parents.

The main plot of Sophie And The Albino Camel is about how Sophie and Gidaado rescue Chobbal from the Tuareg bandits who steal him.

But along the way, there are plenty of humorous asides, many of them stories Stephen culled from the nomadic Fulani tribesmen among whom he lives.

One involves the baobab tree - a notoriously ugly tree found on the edge of the desert that looks for all the world as though it has been planted upside down with its roots in the air.

So it has, according to the Fulani.

They have a story about how it used to be the most beautiful tree in the world - so beautiful that it began to boast no other tree could match it.

"So God passed judgement on it and decided to turn it upside down!" says Stephen. "He planted it with its broods sticking out - and now it is the ugliest tree in the world."

A joyous adventure story for the 8-10s.