The Bird King
A Novel
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4.2 • 46 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
One of NPR's 50 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the Decade: A fifteenth-century palace mapmaker must hide his powers in the time of the Inquisition . . .
Award-winning author G. Willow Wilson's debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year and established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.
Fatima is a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain. Her dearest friend, Hassan, the palace mapmaker and the one man who doesn't leer at her with desire, has a secret—he can draw maps of places he's never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan's surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan's gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As the two traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.
"Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic, and the kind of smart, honest writing mind that knits together and bridges cultures and people." —Neil Gaiman, author of Norse Mythology
"A triumph . . . one of the best fantasy writers working today." —BookPage
"A treasure-house of a novel, thrilling, tender, funny, and achingly gorgeous. I loved it." —Lev Grossman, author of the Magicians trilogy
Customer Reviews
Amazing book
I don’t give many 5 stars. This novel is a wonder tale, historical detail spotless, compelling writing.
Set just as Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile were pushing the last Moorish out of Iberia, during the Reconquista in January 1492, a Circassian slave girl who occasionally called to the Sultan’s bed, flees with her friend, a gay Palace cartographer, with the help of a jinn and the Sultan’s mother.
She has never been outside the palace, nor does she have any shoes other than flimsy indoor slippers, she only knows the Spanish delegation will torture and kill her friend, for his orientation and his supernatural skills with cartography. Drawing maps, he can alter the location of things on an ordinary map, and put them back as they were. The Catholic Spaniards think he’s in league with a demon.
Their road to the nearest seaport town is fraught with danger, with the Spaniards intent on capturing them both, and neither of them ever having had to move so quickly for so long.
They obtain a boat which has a Breton monk sleeping in it, and do their best to escape. Lots of near misses, until the cartographer draws a map leading to an imaginary island from Islamic folklore.
The young woman, “lost in time and space, adrift in her dreaming”*, fiercely desiring freedom—and power, if she can— leads the journey and does her best to command once land is reached.
The reader never knows what will happen next.
The words in quotes are from the song “Aqaba” by Bill Caddick, sung by June Tabor, on her album, Aqaba.
Wonderful tale.
Stunningly vivid imagery, strong characters, profoundly heart achingly beautiful relationships. Couldn’t put it down.