The Arabian Nights Retold
Interest in Scheherazade's mythical tales show no signs of waning with the news that Renée Ahdieh's two reworkings of her One Thousand and One Nights legends will finally get a worldwide release in April. The Wrath and the Dawn and The Rose and the Dagger have slowly built a YA fan base since the American author's debut was published last year, with USA Today marvelling at the "riveting Game of Thrones meets Arabian Nights love story". It should be a breakthrough year for the writer – Flame In the Mist will also be published in May, with her darkly fantastical storytelling shifting to a Japanese setting.
Exit Through The Bookshop
The early part of next year will be exciting for fans of British-Pakistani writing. The National has seen an early copy of Nadeem Aslam's The Golden Legend, which will be published on January 12, and it is another fantastically detailed exploration of Pakistan's past and present as two outsiders look for love against a backdrop of violence and fear. Once you've finished that one, move on to Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, which is also a love story, this time in a time of civil war and forced migration. The author, who also wrote The Reluctant Fundamentalist, says it is a "novel about refugees which reminds us we're all refugees".
Running Rings Around Each Other
Lord of the Rings might never have been written had there not been a bout of one-upmanship between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. It has long been suggested that the writers dared each other to write a sci-fi novel, and a British newspaper has proposed the actual date of the wager – early December 1936. It's too lengthy a piece of literary history to recount here, but Lord of the Rings evolved from Tolkien's "Atlantis complex", after the friends had the idea, 80 years ago, to write adventure stories "that would lead to the discovery of the literal truth behind a well-known myth – the destruction of Atlantis and fall of Satan."
