Outremer - Softcover

Saleh, Nabil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704381036 ISBN 13: 9780704381032

Publisher: Interlink Pub Group Inc, 1999

Synopsis

A novel of faith and heresy, loyalty and intrigue, set in the 13th-century.

About this title

About the Author:

Nabil Saleh has been a practicing lawyer in Beirut and London since 1957. He is an expert in Islamic law and is the author of Open House and Outremer.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An awkward historical bildungsroman, set in Europe and the Middle East during the Crusades, traces a young man's path from uncertain faith to happy nihilism as numerous Palestinian factions struggle for power and revenge. This second (but first to appear here) by Saleh, a Lebanese lawyer, shows that tangled loyalties and senseless violence are nothing new in the Middle East. Aimeric, the sheltered, idealistic son of Maurel, a Cathar draper living in Milan, journeys to the Outremer (a collection of 13th-century Crusader fiefs clinging to coastal Palestine) to assassinate the Crusader warlord Philip of Montfort. Maurel wants Aimeric to kill Philip because fifty years ago Philip's father, Guy, on orders from the the Pope and the King of France, massacred hundreds of Maurel's fellow Cathars in Languedoc. Traveling via Venice (where he meets the young Marco Polo), Aimeric soon falls ``under the spell of the mythical and mystical Orient, where nothing seemed, or indeed was, certain or final. What appears to be a simple struggle between the Crusaders and the Cairo-based Mameluke Sultan Baybars is in fact much more complex, with an array of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic sects conspiring against each other to gain power or just stay out of harm's way. Smitten with the charms of the beautiful Maronite Christian Zeinab, Aimeric apprentices himself to Samuel, a kindly Jewish doctor who treats everyone, regardless of religious affiliation. When a pair of Ismali Assassins masquerading as Christian converts murder Philip, Aimeric is enlisted in a scheme to murder a betrayer who killed one of Zeinab's relatives. Caught in a confusing series of plots and counterplots, Aimeric flees with Zeinab to the Lebanese city of Gibelet (biblical Byblos), where he finds that family is more important than religion, mercy more fulfilling than revenge. Wooden, but still a worthwhile evocation of Palestine's oppressive historical burden. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Interlink Pub Group Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0704381036
• ISBN 13: 9780704381032
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208