The City of Truth

Baghdad, 812. A boy chooses a chest of records over his trapped father-and spends the rest of his life insisting the choice was the other way around.

Samir ibn Nadir believes violence begins when words fail. His gift for reconciling Arabic, Syriac, and Greek texts carries him from his family's ruined paper workshop into the scholarly and political circles of the Abbasid court. He marries Mariam, a Christian healer who records what patients say when learned books are wrong. He befriends Tugh...