[1] The novel won the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the 2007 Waverton Good Read Award.

A shy, academic type, he is not attuned to the increasingly dull lovelessness of his marriage and why his chilly financier wife Mary has seized the chance to work abroad.

When a rich Yemeni sheikh and angling enthusiast, Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama, offers to fund a scheme to populate the desert wadis of his country with Scottish salmon, Jones initially dismisses it as impossible and preposterous.

The film, rendered as a romantic comedy, starred Ewan McGregor as Dr Alfred Jones and Emily Blunt as Harriet Chetwode-Talbot.

Torday was particularly amused by the fact that, shortly after the film's release, British holidaymakers made enquiries to Yemeni tourism organisations asking about their real-life non-existent salmon fishing industry.