Smoke and Saffron

There is a reef off Sidon that the fishermen call the Grandmother, because she is old and patient and has taken more men than anyone can count. On the second night of a storm she takes the Mabruka, and in the morning she gives Wardah back: face down on a black rock beneath the Sea Castle, with salt in her mouth and her hands still shaped around a cask.

Her brother Sabri was last seen lashed to a broken spar, grinning at the wave that came for him. A fisherman swears he saw a young man riding the current south. South is something. South is not paradise.

Alone in an Ottoman port where a girl who speaks little is thought to be ill, Wardah lets her hair be cut, learns to walk as if her father owns the street, and takes a name far too large for her: Qaysar. Within days she is standing by the door of the Emir Laith, young, handsome and lovesick for Sitt Layla, who is mourning a father and a brother and receives no one. The Emir has a new go-between. Layla has a new reason to open her garden gate. And Qaysar has a problem that no amount of silence will fix.

Up the hill, the late Hajj Mansur’s house is already crowded: a chief steward who counts the lemons, an uncle who will not stop talking about grief, a hopeless suitor, and a dervish who walks in and out of palaces with a snake in his basket because nobody has ever told the guards to stop him.

Warm, witty and full of music, Smoke and Saffron is a novel about disguise, devotion and the people the sea decides to return.