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Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

A stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima and Hassan, courtiers in the last emirate of Muslim Spain. 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 Hassan himself as a person of interest to the Inquisition. 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.

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