Tausend und eine Nacht, Band 1

The greatest storytelling marathon in human history begins with a woman who must captivate a murderer or die. Scheherazade, newly married to a king who executes each wife after a single night, resolves to survive by never letting her husband reach morning without leaving him desperate to hear what happens next. She weaves tales within tales, adventures of sailors and sorcerers, clever thieves and treacherous viziers, spirits imprisoned in bottles and princesses disguised as slaves, each story interrupted at sunset, each cliffhanger buying her another day. Over one thousand and one nights, the king who meant to kill her becomes the king who cannot bear to lose her. These are the stories that taught Western readers to fall in love with the Orient: Ali Baba's forty thieves, Aladdin's magic lamp, Sinbad's seven impossible voyages. Beneath the wonder lie darker currents, sex, violence, philosophy, and the radical idea that narrative itself can bend fate. A book that invented the modern novel before novels existed, and that still reads like nothing else on earth.