Tahir Shah

Forty-five million years ago, the supercontinent of Gondwanaland split apart, creating what we know as India, Africa, and South America. Curiously, this vast landmass was named after the aboriginal tribe of Gonds, who lived in central India. Meeting a Gond storyteller on a visit to Mumbai, Tahir Shah first learned of their ancient saga - the epic Tale of Lingo - and vowed to visit all three regions of prehistoric Gondwanaland. As he travels both west and east, Shah encounters an extraordinary miscellany of characters, attends magical ceremonies and rites, as well as seeking out mythical treasures and fragments of lost folklore. Roughing it most of the way, his expeditions take him from the sweltering hinterland of central India, through Africa, and on by twists and turns to the stark tundra of Argentine Patagonia. One of the strangest and most compelling travel books of its time, Beyond the Devil's Teeth is a remarkable feat of storytelling, and was the classic travelogue that placed Shah at the forefront of the travel writing genre.

On the morning of her fifth birthday, Miki Suzuki's aged grandfather gives her an unusual gift - the fragment of a story. The tale tells of a magical realm where all the women are beautiful, dressed in the finest gowns, and where the men have the looks of movie stars. This place, young Miki learns, is a city in far-off Europe - a city called Paris. The story takes seed in Miki's mind and, over twenty years, she becomes obsessed with the French capital. Having studied its history, language, and traditions, she vows that one day she will venture there. Winning a competition at work, Miki embarks on the journey of a lifetime to her dream destination. Feverishly excited and exhausted after a long flight, she hits the ground running in her desperation to see every last tourist sight in town. But, as the others in the tour group look on in horror, the telltale signs of a rare condition begin to manifest themselves - a condition known as 'Paris Syndrome'. Made crazed by a stream of unfavourable events, Miki goes on a riotous rampage, which ends in her mooning the salesclerk in a designer store - an assault that grips the French nation. So begins the treatment in the most bizarre of clinics - a refuge for fellow sufferers of Paris Syndrome. All this set against a backdrop of vigilante groups, trade wars, bounty hunters, and true love. Hilarious and toe-curling, Miki Suzuki's psychological rollercoaster ride gets under the skin like nothing else, as the novel explores the real condition that afflicts dozens of Japanese tourists each year. Tahir Shah's mastery as a storyteller, and his knowledge of both East and West, makes Paris Syndrome a novel touched with real magic - a story within a story that's worth its weight in gold.

The greatest eye surgeon of his age, Dr. Amadeus Kaine is feted by royalty, dictators, Hollywood, and the international jet-set. An epicurean of sophistication and dark obsessions, he's devoted his life to locating the perfect food. While treating one of Central Asia's most depraved despots, Kaine is given a little pie to eat - a delicacy reserved for guests of the president. It's the most delicious thing that's ever passed the surgeon's lips, and one that has seemingly miraculous effects. All of a sudden, Kaine finds that his bald patch is growing over with thick black hair, and that his body is healing itself from the inside out. Best of all, he realizes that his mental faculties are stimulated in ways he never believed possible. He can write books in a few hours, learn languages in a matter of days, and effortlessly solve problems from world hunger to global warming. The drawback is that the dictator's little pies are prepared with human eyes, taken from convicts working in the opal mines. Horrified that he's unwittingly become a cannibal, Amadeus Kaine can't think of anything but getting his hands on some more of the illicit specialty. Obsessed in particular by green eyes, he begins hunting for victims to satisfy his wayward craving. While perfecting his method, he learns to appreciate the subtleties in taste. As he does so, a terrible affliction strikes - oculosis. An eye disease that has jumped the species gap from industrialized poultry farming, the virus rips through society, robbing the masses of their sight. The only man who can save the world is the inimitable Dr. Kaine, who is himself on the run. One of the strangest tales of obsession, mania and intrigue ever told, Eye Spy will quite literally change the way you see the world.

Eclectic and beguiling observations by bestselling author Tahir Shah, Three Essays considers three quite different subjects in ways they have never been considered before. The first piece looks at cannibalism, noting how prevalent it has been throughout human history. Only frowned upon in relatively recent times, Shah makes the point that cannibalism was never regarded as shocking. The second essay considers the Kumbh Mela - an Indian cultural extravaganza and the greatest human gathering of all time. The third text looks at the way Arab Science from the so-called 'Golden Age' of Islam shapes the world in which we live - making everything from mobile phones to medical transfusions possible.

Eight strangers were clustered around the campfire of the distant caravanserai ---- silhouetted, ragged, and ripened by adventure. As the flames licked the darkness, sparks spitting up into the desert's nocturnal firmament, a traveller cleared his throat and told his tale. One at a time, each adventurer regaled the others around the campfire with a story. Inspired by the pages of The Thousand and One Nights, the eight tales are woven together to form a magical tapestry of enchanted kingdoms and desert islands, sorcerers and jinns. First published in special handmade limited editions, this volume of The Caravanserai Stories brings all eight spellbinding tales together in one remarkable collection. Building on foundations laid down in scores of other published works, these stories recounted at the desert caravanserai have been hailed as Tahir Shah's finest work.

Although Tahir Shah began his writing career with travel literature, in recent years he has embraced the realm of fiction, producing groundbreaking work on an awe-inspiring scale. His first work within the genre was Timbuctoo, a major foundation stone of historical fiction. A series of trailblazing bestselling novels quickly followed, positioning Shah as a supreme force in imaginary realism, worthy of Borges and Chatwin. Shah's fictional corpus includes the first three titles within the Jinn Hunter series - a vast fantastical universe inspired by the realm of A Thousand and One Nights. It also includes Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man, a novel that is as breathtaking in scope as it is in ingenuity. In addition, Shah's works of fiction encompass the hilarious trilogy of the wise fool of Oriental folklore, Nasrudin, and a dazzling array of short novels and stories - from the mesmerizing Eye Spy to Godman, and from Casablanca Blues to Scorpion Soup. The Tahir Shah Fiction Reader includes chapters from -Eye SpyGodmanCasablanca BluesHannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of ManJinn Hunter: Book One - The PrismJinn Hunter: Book Two - The JinnslayerJinn Hunter: Book Three - The PerplexityParis SyndromeScorpion SoupTales Told to a MelonThe Arabian Nights AdventuresThe Misadventures of the Mystifying NasrudinThe Peregrinations of the Perplexing NasrudinThe Voyages and Vicissitudes of NasrudinTimbuctoo

Over the last thirty years, Tahir Shah has roamed the furthest limits of the world, and produced a stupefying body of travel literature, embracing a cornucopia of quests. He has sought out the so-called Birdmen of Peru, studied magic with the godmen of India, searched for the mysterious lost city of the Incas, and for the fabled lost treasure of Mughal India. Shah has noted that seeking out the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels is centrally important to him. The themes of zigzagging adventure, spontaneity, and walking a path that's utterly original are found throughout his travelogues. As far as Shah is concerned, 'Travel itself is not only the destination, but the greatest teacher, confidant, and friend. Forward movement enables a mysterious kind of alchemy to occur, in which the mind is freed from the restrictions and biases of daily life.' Wide-ranging in scope, The Tahir Shah Travel Reader contains full-length chapters from many of the bestselling books that have made Shah's name. They include chapters from -Beyond the Devil's TeethCultural ResearchHouse of the Tiger KingIn Arabian NightsIn Search of King Solomon's MinesJourney Through NamibiaSorcerer's ApprenticeThree EssaysThe Caliph's HouseThe Clockmaker's BoxThe Reason to WriteTrail of FeathersTravels With MyselfTravels With Nasrudin

For a thousand nights, ruthless King Shahriyar weds a new bride at dusk, only to have her executed the following dawn. Fearing for their lives, the kingdom's young women are in hiding, or have already fled. A request arrives for Scheherazade, the wise and beautiful daughter of the chief vizier, to be married to the cruel and cold-blooded king. But rather than flee, she accepts the invitation. Having received instructions from the friendly Blue Witch, Scheherazade is wed to the king. In the royal apartment, an hourglass is turned, the falling grains of sand marking the last hours of her life. Rather than resigning herself to fate, Scheherazade does something none of the other brides dared to do... She begins to tell a story. Casting a pinch of magic dust into the brazier, the tale she spins comes to life in the fire's flames. At first, all is well, and the king is amused. But, suddenly, the story goes awry - thrown off-kilter by a spell cast by King Shahriyar's own magician. Scheherazade finds herself magically transported to a distant desert caravanserai, where she is joined by three others - Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. The lives of all four depend on getting the story back on track. And the only way to do that is to locate the story's seed - the seed of The Thousand and One Nights. A fabulous tale of mystery, magic, and a daring quest, The Arabian Nights Adventures throws together the main protagonists from the greatest and most important collection of stories ever assembled. An award-winning writer, storyteller, and expert in The Thousand and One Nights, Tahir Shah brings the ancient treasury of tales to life in a vibrant new way, recalibrating it for the time in which we live.

Travels With Myself is a dazzling collection of selected writings by bestselling travel writer and novelist, Tahir Shah. Written over twenty years, the pieces form an eclectic treasury of stories from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond. Some consider the lives of women in society - both in East and West. The women-only police stations of Brazil, for instance, as well as the female inmates waiting to die on America's death row, or the young widows who clear landmines for a living in northern Cambodia. More still consider Morocco, where Shah and his family resided for many years in a mansion set squarely in the middle of a sprawling Casablanca shantytown. Yet more reflect on the oddities and contradictions of the modern world, such as why, in India each summer, hundreds of thousands line up to swallow live fish; or how the Model T Ford sounded the death knell of lavish Edwardian ostrich-feather hats. Regarded as a brilliantly original writer, Tahir Shah has gained a worldwide following by perceiving the lands through which he travels with a lens honed to detail. Questioning everything he observes, Shah taps down to a bedrock of wonder which most writers and travellers don't even realise exists.

Inspired by a book his grandfather wrote eighty years ago, master storyteller and author Tahir Shah set about creating Scorpion Soup, an intense experience of interlinked and overlapping tales. Having been raised on stories from both East and West, Shah believes that tales work on numerous levels, subtly influencing the way we see the world, and the way we learn from it. Magical instruments, and secret machineries in their own right, stories live within us all. And, the way we appreciate them from the cradle is, Shah believes, part of the default setting of Mankind. Introduced in early childhood to the wonders of A Thousand and One Nights, Shah learned to receive and appreciate complex structures and storytelling devices. These have been used throughout history to pass on ideas, cultural values and information, as well as, of course, to entertain. Having been inspired by The Nights, and the way that one story leads into another, and yet another, Shah uses this framing technique in Scorpion Soup. An interwoven and intoxicating collection of tales, the book descends down through many layers, as one story progresses into the next, and eventually brings us back to the first. Unlike anything that has been published in the Occidental world before, Scorpion Soup is a rich and diverse feast for the senses, a book that instructs as much as it does entertain.

As a child in rural England, Tahir Shah first learned the secrets of illusion from a visiting Indian magician, the hereditary guardian of his ancestor's tomb. More than two decades later he set out to India on a quest: to study the form of magic used across the subcontinent on a daily basis by so-called 'godmen'. Making his way to Kolkata, Tahir is taken on by Hakim Feroze, magician, illusionist, sadist, master, and irrepressible polymath, before embarking on what is described as a 'journey of observation'. Shah's initiation into the brotherhood of Indian magicians makes for one of the most adventurous, enlivening, and downright bizarre travel books of its time. Lifting the lid on age-old illusions - such as human hibernation and levitation - Sorcerer's Apprentice established Shah as one of the leading travel writers of his generation. Nothing is what it seems in this spellbinding tale. A rollercoaster of a read from start to finish, the travelogue reveals a secret underbelly of life that thrives across India, but which most authors hardly ever notice exists.

Oddball and loner Oliver Quinn was raised by his uncle, the proprietor of Ozymandias & Son, New York's most bizarre emporium of Oriental rugs. Through a series of what he believes to be coincidences, Oliver discovers a portal in the basement of the shop - a portal to a magical world called Zonus. Gradually, Oliver begins to understand that everything he'd ever considered fact is fantasy, and that if he is to survive, he'll have to start thinking in an entirely new way. In reality, our world is nothing but a backwater in a colossal multiverse, where every permutation is not only possible, but certain. With the veil lifted, Oliver is introduced to the parallel life form with which we share the multiverse - the mysterious and all-powerful race of jinn. Far from the loveable blue-skinned giants projected by Hollywood, jinn are capable of wreaking terror on an unknown scale. When they go rogue, as they frequently do, they must be captured and incarcerated in the Prism, a vast penitentiary. Trapping rogue jinn is a perilous task entrusted to the Jinn Hunters, the bravest fraternity of warriors in existence. Having been accepted into the Cadenta, the training academy of Jinn Hunters, Oliver is pitted against the gravest new reality: the fact that Nequissimus, the most evil jinn in all existence, has just escaped... Born into the hallowed ancestry of the Jinnslayers, Oliver Quinn is the only man alive with a chance at defeating the great jinn, and returning him to his cell in the Prism. A cross between A Thousand and One Nights and Men in Black, THE JINNSLAYER is the second awe-inspiring novel in Tahir Shah's much-celebrated JINN HUNTER series. One of the most original books of its age, it lures the reader into a twilight zone conjured from pure imagination.

When the Spanish Conquistadors swept through Peru in the sixteenth century, they were searching for great golden treasure. In 1572 they stormed the Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba, only to find the city deserted, burned, and already stripped of its wealth. A legend says that the Incas had retreated deep into the jungle, where they built another magnificent city in an inaccessible quarter of the cloud forest. And for more than four centuries explorers and adventurers, archaeologists and warrior-priests have searched for the gold and riches of the Incas, and this lost city of Paititi, known by the local Machiguenga tribe as 'The House of the Tiger King'. After the lost city obsession had gnawed away at Tahir Shah for almost a decade, he could stand it no more. He put together an expedition and set out into Peru's Madre de Dios jungle, the densest cloud forest on Earth. He teams up with Pancho, a Machiguenga warrior who asserts that in his youth he came upon a massive series of stone ruins deep in the jungle. Pancho's ambition was to leave the jungle and visit a 'live' bustling city so the two men make a pact: if Pancho takes Shah to Paititi, then he will take Pancho to the Peruvian capital. House of the Tiger King is the tale of Shah's remarkable adventure to find the greatest lost city of the Americas, and the treasure of the Incas. Along the way he considers others who have spent decades in pursuit of lost cities, and asks why anyone would find it necessary to mount such a quest at all.

For more than a century Henry Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines has inspired generations of young men to set forth in search of adventure. But long before Rider Haggard's classic, explorers, theologians and scientists scoured the known world for the source of Solomon's astonishing wealth. The Bible's wisest king built a temple at Jerusalem that was said to be more fabulous than any other landmark in the ancient world. Adorned with an abundance of gold, it was said to be gleaned from a mysterious land known as 'Ophir'. Taking his leads from a mixture of texts including the Septuagint, the earliest known form of the Bible, as well as using geological, geographical and folkloric sources, Tahir Shah sets out in search for Solomon's gold mines. For him the obvious place to look is Ethiopia, the ancient and enigmatic realm nestled in the horn of Africa. The ensuing journey takes Shah to a remote cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the fabulous rock-hewn churches at Lalibela. Then, in the south of the country, Shah discovers a massive illegal gold mine. Like something out of the Old Testament, there are thousands of men, women and children digging at the ground with their bare hands. In Search of King Solomon's Mines is regarded as a masterpiece of adventure, its twisting narrative itself touched with gold.

Enthralled by a line from the chronicle of a sixteenth-century monk which suggested that the Incas 'flew over the jungle like birds', and by the recurring theme of flying in Peruvian folklore, Tahir Shah sets out to discover whether the Incas really did fly or glide above the rainforest of Peru. Or was the Spanish cleric alluding to flight of a different kind - one inspired by a powerful hallucinogen, the so-called Vine of the Dead? After gathering equipment in London - and advice, not least from Sir Wilfred Thesiger - Shah's long quest begins. Picking up clues as he goes, the trail begins at the Atacama Desert with its immense cryptic Nazca Lines and thirty thousand mummified corpses. Then, on through the Peruvian hinterland of the Altiplano and, finally, to an epic river journey up the Amazon. There, lost in its seething green rainforest, he discovers the secrets of the Shuar, a tribe formerly infamous for shrinking human heads. Even for a traveller not unused to surreal adventure, there are many extraordinary encounters in this astounding travel book. Gruesome but often hilarious, Trail of Feathers is peppered with madmen and dreamers, with sorcerers, con-men and jungle experts. Each one reveals a little more of the puzzle, before Tahir Shah can at last discover the truth about the Birdmen of Peru.

For a thousand nights, ruthless King Shahriyar weds a new bride at dusk, only to have her executed the following dawn. Fearing for their lives, the kingdom's young women are in hiding, or have already fled. A request arrives for Scheherazade, the wise and beautiful daughter of the chief vizier, to be married to the cruel and cold-blooded king. But rather than flee, she accepts the invitation. Having received instructions from the friendly Blue Witch, Scheherazade is wed to the king. In the royal apartment, an hourglass is turned, the falling grains of sand marking the last hours of her life. Rather than resigning herself to fate, Scheherazade does something none of the other brides dared to do... She begins to tell a story. Casting a pinch of magic dust into the brazier, the tale she spins comes to life in the fire's flames. At first, all is well, and the king is amused. But, suddenly, the story goes awry - thrown off-kilter by a spell cast by King Shahriyar's own magician. Scheherazade finds herself magically transported to a distant desert caravanserai, where she is joined by three others - Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. The lives of all four depend on getting the story back on track. And the only way to do that is to locate the story's seed - the seed of The Thousand and One Nights. A fabulous tale of mystery, magic, and a daring quest, The Arabian Nights Adventures throws together the main protagonists from the greatest and most important collection of stories ever assembled. An award-winning writer, storyteller, and expert in The Thousand and One Nights, Tahir Shah brings the ancient treasury of tales to life in a vibrant new way, recalibrating it for the time in which we live.

In a career that has embraced fiction and non-fiction, and bridged West with East, Tahir Shah has frequently commented on his own work - or on that of other authors - in a series of supplementary essays. For the first time, the dozens of Prefaces, Introductions, Forewords and Afterwords produced by Shah have been collected and published in a volume of their own. Fascinating for admirers of his literary corpus, the texts illuminate how and why Shah structured each book as he did. Lifting the veil on an author's thought processes, the collection exposes layers and sub-layers through decades of work. Additional essays introduce material by other authors, such as the acclaimed and short-lived American adventurer Richard Halliburton, the medieval Arab explorer Ibn Battutah, and the fabulously evocative treatise on jinn, edited by Robert Lebling. A treasure trove of thinking, covering a vast spectrum of themes, The Clockmaker's Box is an irresistible companion volume to Tahir Shah's extraordinary work.