For a thousand nights, ruthless King Shahriyar weds a new bride at dusk, only to have her executed the following dawn. Fearing for their lives, the kingdom's young women are in hiding, or have already fled.
A request arrives for Scheherazade, the wise and beautiful daughter of the chief vizier, to be married to the cruel and cold-blooded king. But rather than flee, she accepts the invitation.
Having received instructions from the friendly Blue Witch, Scheherazade is wed to the king. In the royal apartment, an hourglass is turned, the falling grains of sand marking the last hours of her life. Rather than resigning herself to fate, Scheherazade does something none of the other brides dared to do...
She begins to tell a story.
Casting a pinch of magic dust into the brazier, the tale she spins comes to life in the fire's flames. At first, all is well, and the king is amused. But, suddenly, the story goes awry - thrown off-kilter by a spell cast by King Shahriyar's own magician.
Scheherazade finds herself magically transported to a distant desert caravanserai, where she is joined by three others - Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. The lives of all four depend on getting the story back on track. And the only way to do that is to locate the story's seed - the seed of
The Thousand and One Nights
.
A fabulous tale of mystery, magic, and a daring quest,
The Arabian Nights Adventures
throws together the main protagonists from the greatest and most important collection of stories ever assembled.
An award-winning writer, storyteller, and expert in
, Tahir Shah brings the ancient treasury of tales to life in a vibrant new way, recalibrating it for the time in which we live.