"I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages." Thus wrote Leo Africanus, in his fortieth year, in this imaginary autobiography of the famous geographer, adventurer, and scholar Hasan al-Wazzan, who was born in...

Ossyane, a young Lebanese man and his Jewish wife Clara return to live in Haifa after World War II. Just as war breaks out in the new-born state of Israel, Ossayne is forced to go to Beirut. The border with Israel closes behind him and he becomes separated from his wife with tragic consequences.

The 1993 winner of the Prix Goncourt. It is an historical novel which explores myth, passion and loyalty from Lebanon's troubled past, by tracing the life of Tanios, a child of the mountains, who one day in 1840 disappeared from the rock that now bears his name.

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.

In this exploration of our post-9/11 world, leading Lebanese novelist and intellectual, Amin Maalouf sets out to understand how we have arrived at such disorder. He explores three aspects of disorder - intellectual, economic and climatic - in order to identify a better way forward.

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.