Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early
passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of
classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past,
Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary
adventures–from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to
Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories–in a
wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous
humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful
characters worthy of Scheherazade’s most tantalizing tales.
They’re an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad
Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty
headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man
as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a
sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in
arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus
Mountains, circa A.D. 950, living as they please and
surviving however they can–as blades and thieves for hire
and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the
gullible from their money. No strangers to tight scrapes and
close shaves, they’ve left many a fist shaking in their
dust, tasted their share of enemy steel, and made good any
number of hasty exits under hostile circumstances.
None of which has necessarily prepared them to be dragooned
into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the
Khazar Empire. Usurped by his brutal uncle, the callow and
decidedly ill-tempered young royal burns to reclaim his
rightful throne. But doing so will demand wicked cunning,
outrageous daring, and foolhardy bravado . . . not to
mention an army. Zelikman and Amram can at least supply the
former. But are these gentlemen of the road prepared to
become generals in a full-scale revolution? The only
certainty is that getting there–along a path paved with
warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary
elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the
grandest adventures are made of–will be much more than half
the fun.
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