Every night, Shahrazad begins a story. And every morning, the Sultan lets her live another day—providing the story is interesting enough to capture his attention. After almost one thousand nights, Shahrazad is running out of tales. And that is how Marjan's story begins.
It falls to Marjan to help Shahrazad find new stories—ones the Sultan has never heard before. To do that, Marjan is forced to undertake a dangerous and forbidden mission: sneak from the harem and travel the city, coaxing strangers to tell her stories and bringing them back to Shahrazad. But as she searches the city, a wonderful thing happens. Marjan, who had been just a quiet spinner of tales when the story began, becomes the center of a story more surprising than she ever imagined.
Susan Fletcher was born in 1979 in Birmingham, England. She was educated at Saint Martin's School in Solihull, and she studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, *Eve Green*, was published in 2004. She won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize and Author's Club Best First Novel Award. She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon.
