Before You Begin

Before you begin.

This illustrated selection gathers seven tales from The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, moving between palace chambers, ruined courtyards, markets, police courts and merchant houses.

The sequence is less a single plot than a chain of tests: wit before power, generosity after ruin, theft under witnesses, official judgement, hidden evidence and the sudden turns by which reputation changes in public.

The illustrations keep the reader close to the social world of the tales. Faces, objects, rooms and routes are treated as clues: a cup, a gold dish, a purse, a sealed chest, a lattice, a ledger, a song heard in private.

Read for reversals. In these stories, justice often begins as performance, and the smallest object in the room may be the thing that changes the whole case.