The Book of Saladin is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and retainers so that he might present a full portrait in the Sultan's memoirs. A series of interconnected stories follows, tales brimming over with warmth, earthy humor and passions in which ideals clash with realities and dreams are confounded by desires.

At the heart of the novel is an affecting love affair between the Sultan's favored wife, Jamila, and the beautiful Halina, a later addition...

Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet--Tariq Ali's much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun--known as Plato--an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where "human dignity...

The fourth novel in Tariq Ali's 'Islam Quintet' charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but his conscience is troubled...

A Sultan in Palermo is a mythic novel in which pride, greed, and lust intermingle with resistance and greatness. It echoes a past that can still be heard today.

Praise for the Islam Quintet:

"A richly woven tapestry that even before its...

The story of a family whose life mirrors the rise and fall of the Soviet Union

With the fall of Communism, East German dissident Vlady Meyer's life begins to fall apart. As the German nation unifies, his wife splits up with him. He loses his university job now that the times have turned against his Marxist views. He wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family's long and passionate involvement with communism really meant, but he can't. Vlady's story is interwoven with that of Ludwik, Kim Philby's recruiter, and his four comrades, brilliant Galician secret agents working...

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali paints an illuminating portrait of Lenin

"Without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain."

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowledged the full magnitude of his intellectual and political achievements. But his legacy has been lost in misinterpretation; he is worshipped but rarely read.

On the centenary of...

Paediatric Intensive Care gives practical and realistic advice for all those who care for critically ill children. Organised predominantly by system or speciality for easy reference, it also comprehensively covers the underlying principles that guide clinicians in every day practice.

Britain's leading radical updates his attack on the failures of the political centre ground

One of the world's best-known radicals relives the early years of the protest movement