The Fabulous Road
“Highly recommend for the reader who wants to be enthralled and entertained.”
Synopsis
Winner of the K Blundell Trust Award
The Cook. The Dervish. The Geographer. The Artist. The Jongleur. The Scholar. The Historian. A group of men are imprisoned by their Sultan and await death; they are to be executed for petty crimes.
They all have one regret—not to have done the pilgrimage to Mecca. Then, hey presto! A talking parrot, centuries old, flies into their cell and rebukes them, suggesting they undertake the overland pilgrimage in their minds.
So the prisoners imagine the journey, storytellers weaving art, geography, history, cuisine, literature, philosophy, Sufism, anecdote and comedy, to travel a fabulous road across the breathtaking and punishing landscapes of North Africa.
All the while they are accompanied by the convivial parrot and its recollections of the past, a roller coaster of adventures that prove as colourful as its feathers.
But who will reach Mecca, as one by one the prisoners are dragged out of the cell to meet the executioner?