Book of the Sultan's Seal Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars

Youssef Rakha's groundbreaking first novel was published just after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in 2011. It's hard to imagine a debut of greater urgency or more thrilling innovation. The Book of the Sultan's Seal is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Corbaci, takes around greater Cairo-city of post-9/11 Islam. In a series of visions, Corbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and embarks on a mission the sultan assigns him. Corbaci's trials shed light on the contemporary Arab Muslim's desperation for a sense of identity: Sultan's Seal is both a suspenseful, erotic, riotous novel and an examination of accounts of Muslim demise. The way to a renaissance, Corbaci's journeys lead us to see, may have less to do with dogma and jihad than with love poetry, calligraphy, and the cultural diversity and richness within Islam. Rakha's groundbreaking first novel is now finally in English, ready to astonish new readers around the world.