In the Koran, there are 99 names for God. Does the 100th exist? Months before the dawn of the apocalyptic year of the beast, 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant embarks on a quest to find the answer. He sets out on a journey that will take him across the breadth of the civilized world.

Mysterious beans are found on the market stalls of the East, to which ancient superstition lends the power of favouring the birth of male children. When a French entomologist obtains a few of these beans, he worries that the world has entered a critical phase of its history.

'Leo the African' is based on the true life-story of Hasan al-Wazzan, the 16th-century traveller and writer who came to be known as Leo Africanus, or Leo the African. This is a story of pirates, slave-girls and princesses, in a world in a state of religious flux."

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alledged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.

Mani is born into a time of war - 3rd-century Mesopotamia. Despite being the son of a warrior, he becomes a painter, physician, mystic and prophet, preaching in the battlefields, a doctrine of humility, tolerance and love that becomes known as Manicheanism.

Amin Maalouf has sifted through the works of contemporary Arab chroniclers of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants in the events. He retells their stories in their own style, giving us a vivid portrait of a society rent by internal conflicts and shaken by traumatic encounter with an alien culture.

Maalouf's lucid enquiry into the precise meaning of identity, that which makes each of us unique and dissimilar to any other individual, explores how we define ourselves and what identity has meant and continues to mean in different cultures.