[1] A solicitor helps a young man to travel to the Arabian Peninsula to find his father, a famous oil prospector Colonel Charles Whitaker.

Publishers of the novel offered the following overview of the book's plot: "Charles Whitaker is a Welshman who forsakes his native country for the deserts of Arabia.

The story moves at two levels: One involves a desperate struggle for desert oil; the second, hardly less intense, for father and son to find each other.

In his review of the novel, Robert Wilfred Franson only gives The Doomed Oasis a qualified recommendation, stating that Hammond Innes does what he sets out to do, but the sum of the parts is not wholly satisfactory.

[3] The production starred Tim Munro as George Grant, was produced by John Fawcett Wilson, and was first broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in August 1984.