Sinbad Voyages

The reception room smells of cardamom and sandalwood and, beneath these, something faintly briny - as though the sea itself has crept into the ivory and silk and waited there to be noticed. Sinbad ibn Habib is fifty-two and tired. The young porter at his door is twenty and angry. Over three afternoons and seven voyages, one will tell the other how a man becomes himself, and what such a making costs. Fatima al-Rashid returns to one of the oldest tales in the world and reads it as a study of appetite. Her Sinbad is thirty-two and ruined when he first steps aboard a Basra dhow, a squanderer of his father's name with nothing left but the sea. What follows is the familiar bestiary - the whale mistaken for an island, the valley of diamonds, the cyclops, the old man who will not be set down - but the wonders are scaffolding for a quieter inquiry into ingenuity, complicity, and the twelve men who do not come home. As the porter's questions sharpen across the long afternoons, the merchant's voyages grow stranger and more interior: a king in Serendib who asks why a settled man still sails, a river under a mountain where there is nothing left to bargain with, a promise made to a wife and a sea that calls anyway. A novel about the stories we offer the young, and what we leave out of them.