From award-winning author G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King is an epic
journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula
at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.
G. Willow Wilson's debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and
Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a
vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King,
a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the
royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her
dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan 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 Fatima and Hassan 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.
