Kurban Said, it appears, was formerly known as Essad Bey but had been born Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Baku oil magnate. Tom Reiss spent years in Azerbaijan, Central Europe and the United States tracking down the story behind the novel’s author and published his findings last year in a biography, The Orientalist. The author’s real identity was a matter of speculation until an American journalist picked up the trail. This extraordinary novel is credited to a man called Kurban Said, although this is clearly a nom de plume. Ali and Nino was first published almost seventy years ago and yet this story of love winning through could have been written as a salve for our own world, caught between the opposing tactics of radical Christians and Muslims. They are opposites in many ways, not least because of their religions, and yet their love overcomes all obstacles. Nino is a Georgian Christian beauty of princely blood, a city girl who remembers the wooded hills of her homeland while she longs for the ever more accessible pleasures and inventions of the West. Ali Khan Shirvanshir is the only son of a noble Baku family, a Shiite Muslim who loves the desert, the walls of his city and its Eastern ways.
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