The Bird King
- Subject
- Legends, Myths, Fables - General
- Format
- Trade Paperback
- Pages
- 416
- Publisher
- Grove Press
- Size
- 13.7 cm × 20.3 cm
- ISBN
- 9780802148292
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
Data provided by BiblioShare.
What reviewers said
An NPR "50 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the Decade” Pick
“[An] impeccably researched, meditative and adventurous book . . . profound and heart-wrenching.”
“I loved this book so much . . . The Bird King is ostensibly the story of a journey, of the limits to escape—but it is also a journey into story, and faith, and refuge, the family we choose and the friends we find. It’s deeply beautiful and wondrously sad, and I can't tell if it ended too quickly or if I just needed it not to—if I just wanted to dwell in a home built out of story for a little longer yet.”
“I truly cannot remember the last time I read a book that made me feel the way The Bird King made me feel . . . No summary, no quotes, no analysis of this book can communicate the all-encompassing pleasure of reading it, paragraph after paragraph, page after page. Read it, and treasure it.”
“The Bird King is a compelling, beautifully paced, and beautifully written historical fantasy . . . Wilson skillfully navigates the dualities of love and hate, freedom and captivity, faith and doubt, choice and obligation, and finds all the shades of gray between them. I laughed, I cried, I bit my nails in terror, and I wanted nothing more than to continue spending time with Fatima, Hassan, and their merry band of misfits. An amazing new book from a genuine talent; and while I love her comics work, The Bird King makes me hope that we won’t have to wait another 7 years before her next novel.”
“Steeped in magical realism . . . [and] enchanting otherworldly trappings, it is primarily a novel of ideas. [The Bird King] grapples with who we are, how we love, [and] why we worship . . . [with] prose so vivid and original that one can only read it with envy.”
