Amin Maalouf Books In Order

Novels

Leo the African (1988)
Samarkand (1989)
The Gardens of Light (1991)
The First Century After Beatrice (1994)
The Rock of Tanios (1994)
Ports of Call (1996)
Balthasar’s Odyssey (2002)
The Disoriented (2020)

Non fiction

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1984)
On Identity (2000)
In the Name of Identity (2001)
Origins (2008)
Disordered World (2011)
Adrift (2020)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Amin Maalouf Books Overview

Leo the African

From his chlidhood in Fez, having fled the Christian Inquisition, through his many journeys to the East as an itinerant merhcant, Hasans story is a quixotic catalogue of pirates, slave girls and princesses, encompassing the complexities of a world in a state of religious flux. Hasan too is touched by the instability of the era, performing his hadj to Mecca, then converting to Christianity, only to relapse back to the Muslim faith later in life. In re creating his extraordinary experiences, Amin Maalouf sketches an irrisistible portrait of the Mediterranea world as it was nearly five centuries ago the fall of Granada, the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Renaissance Rome under the Medicis: all contribute to a background of spectacular colour, matched only by the picaresque adventures of Hasan’s life.

Samarkand

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, the Persian poet and sage Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alleged crimes. Recognising genuis, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus beginds the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand. Vividly re creating the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, Amin Maalouf spans continents and centuries with breathtaking vision: the dusky exoticism of 11th century Persia, with its poetesses and assassins; the same country’s struggles nine hundred years later, seen through the eyes of an American academic obsessed with finding the original manuscript ; and the fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, whose tragedy led to the Rubaiyaat’s final resting place all are brought to life with keen assurance by this gifted and award winning writer.

The Gardens of Light

The Gardens of Light tells the life story of Mani, painter, doctor, and prophet born in Mesopotamia modern day Iraq in the early third century of the Christian era. He advocated ‘The Gospel of Light’ a religious system which was a mixture of Gnostic Christian beliefs, ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and some pagan elements. This came to be known as Manichaeism and attracted vast numbers of disciples. The mystic exercised a powerful attraction over his disciples rulers and scholars, itinerant merchants, shippers, baptists and sages who inhabited the shores of the Tigris and was hated by the Magi, the high priests of Zoroastrianism who felt threatened and eventually had him imprisoned, tortured and killed in 276 AD. Amin Maalouf brings life and color to the character and times of Mani. In the pages of The Gardens of Light, Mani’s cry for tolerance can be heard echoing across the centuries of our times. Amin Maalouf won the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios. He is the author of five highly acclaimed novels including Samarkand which was also published by Interlink.

The First Century After Beatrice

A French entomologist, attending a symposium in Cairo, finds a cruious kind of bean being on a market stall. It is claimed the beans, derived from the scarab beetle, have magic powers; specifically the power to guarantee the brith of a male infant and when the entomologist does some research in to the matter, discovering the incidence of female birth has become increasingly rare, he is left in no doubt that the world has entered intoa critical phase of its history. As this beloved daughter Beatrice approaches maturity, the entomologist and his partner question the validity of gender bias, and attempt to redress the growing imbalance before it reaches irreversible proportions. But in the poverty and famine of the South, where male children can mean the difference between survival and starvation, the popularity of the scarab beans is already taking devastating effect.

The Rock of Tanios

An exploration of myth, passion and loyalty from the Lebanon’s troubled past, The Rock of Tanios is another superbly rich and rewarding novel from the author of Samarkand and Leo the African. Expertly controlling his multi faceted narrative with prose of great beauty and power, Maalouf delves into the history of an extraordinary life: that of Tanois, child of the mountains.

Ports of Call

Translated from the French by Alberto Manguel To call your son Ossyane is like calling him Rebellion or Disobedience. When Ossyane’s father gives him that name, it represents the protest of an aristocratic but liberal man against a history of sectarianism and violence that has characterized the world he inherited from his Ottoman ancestors. But his brilliant, dutiful son develops into a peaceable young man, and travels to France to study, away from the burden of his father’s revolutionary ambitions. War breaks out in Europe, and Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance, where he meets Clara. He returns to Beirut, to a rebel hero’s welcome after all, and to joyful marriage with Clara. The Jewish Muslim couple move to Haifa, but if one war has made a hero out of Ossyane, another, much closer to home, is destined to separate him from the people and the world that he loves. In this novel, the first by Amin Maalouf to be set in the modern Middle East, the author’s exceptional gift of narrative lends itself to a story that becomes a powerful allegory for the struggles and anarchy that have beset his native land for the last half century.

Balthasar’s Odyssey

A journey across cultures and civilisations in search of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment. In the Koran there are 99 names for God. Does the 100th exist? Months before the dawn of the apocalyptic ‘Year of the Beast’, 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant embarks on a quest to find the answer. He sets out on a journey that will take him across the breadth of the civilized world, making his way to Constantinople and on to Smyrna and Aleppo before embarking for the Isle of Chios and sailing through the Mediterranean, via Genoa and Lisbon, arriving in London shortly before the outbreak of the Great Fire. The purpose of Balthasar’s expedition is to search for a copy of the rarest of books, one entitled ‘The One Hundredth Name’. Merely to know this most secret of the names of God will, Balthasar believes, ensure he is saved.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

European and Arab versions of the Crusades have little in common. For the Arabs, the 12th and 13th centuries were not a time for glorious conquest, rather they were years of sacrifice and privation spent in repelling a brutal and destructive invasion by hordes of Western barbarians. When, under Saladin, a powerful Muslim army inspired by prophets and poets succeeded in destroying Crusader kingdoms, it was the greatest victory ever won by a non European society against the West. The memory of it still lives in the minds of Arabs today. ‘Maalouf’s story of the Crusades vividly portrays a society rent by internal conflict and devasted by alien warriors. Those two traumatic centuries of Middle Eastern history shaped Arab and Islamic attitudes toward the West, and in many ways still do.’ B O T Editorial Review Board

On Identity

This book offers a lucid inquiry into the precise meaning of one of the most misapplied words and concepts in our language, and one that has given rise to some of the most heated passions and crimes throughout history: identity. The notion of identity be it religious, ethnic, national, or other has been one of the fundamental questions of philosophy from Socrates to Freud. In this series of reflections, the author, a Lebanese who now lives in France, considers how we define ourselves and what identity has meant and continues to mean in different cultures.

In the Name of Identity

In the Name of Identity is as close to summer reading as philosophy gets. It is a personal, sometimes even intimate, account of identity in the world, not a treatise on the thorn*y metaphysics of identity. A novelist by trade, Amin Maalouf is a fluid writer, and he is aided by Barbara Bray’s award winning translation. His aim is to illuminate the roots of violence and hatred, which he sees in tribalistic forms of identity. He argues that our convictions and notions of identity whether cultural, religious, national, or ethnic are socially habituated and frequently dangerous. We’d give them up, he argues, if we thought more closely about them. Though the book has been heralded as radical and surprising, Maalouf essentially espouses an Enlightenment sensibility, a faith in the brotherhood of man. He is a believer in progress, arguing that ‘the wind of globalisation, while it could lead us to disaster, could also lead us to success.’ In fact, he envisions a globalized world in which our local identities are subordinated to a broader ‘allegiance to the human community itself.’ Maalouf wants us to retain our distinctiveness, but he wants it subsumed under the nave of common understanding. Eric de Place

Origins

Origins, by the world renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere spanning, intergenerational saga. Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf’s paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gabrayel, who had settled in Havana. What follows is the gripping excavation of a family s hidden past. Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. But he never loses track of his story s central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his family s past. Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics.

Disordered World

Born into the Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after twenty years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture, East and West joining them with a fierce moral clarity and a propulsive style. Examining tensions between the Arab and Western worlds, Maalouf sees something beyond a ‘clash of civilizations.’ Both cultures have their own continuity, integrity, and morality. Yet in our times, both have become exhausted and debased. The West has betrayed its values, even as it pushes democracy abroad. The Arab world, nostalgic for its golden era, has rushed toward radicalism. We fall short of ideological debate not only because we lack common ground, but because we are fast losing what ground we stood on. Maalouf looks at a century of confrontations between our cultures, culminating in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet he turns to the global challenges we face today climate change, financial collapse, humanitarian disaster with remarkable hope that they may yet unite us in a bid to save what is truly common to us all. Intelligent, impassioned yet measured, Maalouf envisions renewed cohesion in our currently Disordered World.