THE BIRD KING

A fantastical journey set at the height of the Spanish Inquisition from the award-winning author of Alif the Unseen and writer of the Ms. Marvel series and the upcoming Wonder Woman comic, G. Willow Wilson's The Bird King is a jubilant story of love versus power, religion versus faith, and freedom versus safety.

Set in 1491 during the reign of the last sultanate in the Iberian peninsula, The Bird King is the story of Fatima, the only remaining Circassian concubine to the sultan, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan has a secret - he can make maps of places he's never seen and bend the shape of reality with his pen and paper. His magical gift has proven useful to the sultan's armies in wartime and entertained a bored Fatima who has never stepped foot outside the palace walls.

When a party representing the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrives to negotiate the terms of the sultan's surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, little realizing that her new friend Luz represents the Inquisition, and will see Hassan's gift as sorcery, and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With everything on the line, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan, and taste the freedom she has never known?

Fatima and Hassan traverse Iberia to the port, helped along the way by a jinn who has taken a liking to themVikram the Vampire, who readers may remember from Alif the Unseen. Pursued all the while by Luz, who somehow always seems to know where they will end up, they narrowly escape from her generals by commandeering a ship, and accidentally also the snoozing Breton monk belowdecks. Though they are unsure whether to trust him, because he is a member of the very same faith they are running from, they nevertheless set about learning from him how to crew a ship. And as it becomes clearer both that there is no place on the mainland that they will be safe, and that the three of them are destined to stay together, they set out to do something they never thought possibleto find the mysterious, possibly mythic island of The Bird King, whose shifting boundaries will hopefully keep them safe.

An epic adventure to find safety in a mythical realm, The Bird King challenges us to consider what true love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

G. Willow Wilson read her first superhero comic at age 9. She writes the Hugo-Award winning comic book series Ms Marvel and is the author of "Alif the Unseen" which has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She wrote a memoir called The Butterfly Mosque about love, Islam and life in Egypt during the waning years of the Mubarak regime.