What would the pre-modern world be like if, back in the seventh century, the Arab Muslim invaders had been stopped not at the Pyrenees but at the Zagros range? If Islamic rule had been established over almost the whole of Europe and much of the Americas, leaving most of Asia to be subjugated by Buddhist Turco-Mongols, and the northern lands – and seas – of North America, Europe, and Asia by pagan descendants of the Vikings? Find out by reading the journal of Umar, a young Arabian prince fleeing captivity in a northern island outpost of the Qurtuby Caliphate, as he tricks and fights his way to freedom in the company of two other fugitives. No religion or society is spared in this fast-paced satirical survey of a world at once utterly different from, and eerily similar to, the one we happen to inhabit. In Book 1, Umar escaped from his prison and made his way to an adjacent island, meeting his first companion on the way – only to be shanghaied and sold into slavery on an even more northerly island. Here he meets his second companion, and the three eventually outwit their master and wangle passage on board an emigrant ship bound across the ocean to the New World. In Book 2 they will meet with even odder variations of the tripartite religious and political pattern that they left behind, as they join an indigenous tribe to fight off an annual attack, and discover secrets that could dangerously shift the balance of power among the three warring cultures.
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