共 During the decades bridging the ninth and tenth centuries C.E., Cordoba, capital city of Moorish Spain, witnesses the turmoil and trust of three generations of a Hebrew family living in the dynamic, absorbing days of the Khalifate of the Umayyads. The Hispania of the Romans and Visigoths has long been subjugated in the hectic hurtle north of Moorish warriors, eager for land, slaves and booty. The Iberia of antiquity has become Muslim Al-Andalus in the 700s CE and beyond.
Moors, Christians and Jews settle into an unconventional, yet expedient coexistence of both rivalry and alliance. All the while they are creating a new, affluent society and endeavouring not to battle with each other! Looking on, but loath to participate, are those mysterious people of the Orient, the Roma Gypsies, practitioners of an ancient lore.
Love, loss and loyalty are blended with fervour, fear and fraud, then drenched with mischief, mayhem and murder to simmer together in the cauldron that is Moorish Spain! In the stew of the heat, the competing characters toil and manoeuver in heroic, and not so heroic, flailings to overcome and succeed!
Reuben, the last Hebrew of his line, recounts his tale. Against the emergence of a fascinating civilization of sciences, humanities, innovation and progress, the breadth of which we may never see again, the reader looks on the joys and triumphs, the challenges and trials of the diverse peoples of Arabic Spain!
In far-off Al-Andalus, had their fates already been written in the book of life, in the annals of destiny? Or does chance await them all in our tale, intertwined as it is with glory and gore, compassion & cruelty?
