Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past, Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures—from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser storie—in a wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade's most tantalizing tales.They're an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa A.D. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can—as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the gullible from their money. No strangers to tight scrapes and close shaves, they've left many a fist shaking in their dust, tasted their share of enemy steel, and made good any number of hasty exits under hostile circumstances.None of which has necessarily prepared them to be dragooned into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire. Usurped by his brutal uncle, the callow and decidedly ill-tempered young royal burns to reclaim his rightful throne. But doing so will demand wicked cunning, outrageous daring, and foolhardy bravado...not to mention an army. Zelikman and Amram can at least supply the former. But are these gentlemen of the road prepared to become generals in a full-scale revolution? The only certainty is that getting there—along a path paved with warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the grandest adventures are made of—will be much more than half the fun.
On Discord Arising from the Excessive Love of a Hat
For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve. Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn, and in the stew of chickpeas, carrots, dried lemons and mutton for which the caravansary was renowned, the African held the place nearest the fire, his broad back to the bird, with a view of the doors and the window with its shutters thrown open to the blue dusk. On this temperate autumn evening in the kingdom of Arran in the eastern foothills of the Caucasus, it was only the two natives of burning jungles, the African and the myna, who sought to warm their bones. The precise origin of the African remained a mystery. In his quilted gray bambakion with its frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his buskins suggested a sojourn in the West. No one had hazarded to discover whether the speech of the known empires, khanates, emirates, hordes and kingdoms was intelligible to him. With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel's, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions. Among the travelers at the caravansary there was a moment of admiration, therefore, for the bird's temerity when it seemed to declare, in its excellent Greek, that the African consumed his food in just the carrion-scarfing way one might expect of the bastard offspring of a bald-pated vulture and a Barbary ape.
For a moment after the insult was hurled, the African went on eating, without looking up from the shatranj board, indeed without seeming to have heard the remark at all. Then, before anyone quite understood that calumny so fine went beyond the powers even of the myna, and that the bird was innocent, this once, of slander, the African reached his left hand into his right buskin and, in a continuous gesture as fluid and unbroken as that by which a falconer looses his fatal darling into the sky, produced a shard of bright Arab steel, its crude hilt swaddled in strips of hide, and sent it hunting across the benches.
Neither the beardless stripling who was sitting just to the right of its victim, nor the one-eyed mahout who was the stripling's companion, would ever forget the dagger's keening as it stung the air. With the sound of a letter being sliced open by an impatient hand, it tore through the crown of the wide-brimmed black hat worn by the victim, a fair-haired scarecrow from some fogbound land who had ridden in, that afternoon, on the Tiflis road. He was a slight, thin-shanked fellow, gloomy of countenance, white as tallow, his hair falling in two golden curtains on either side of his long face. There was a rattling twang like that of an arrow striking a tree. The hat flew off the scarecrow's head as if registering his surprise and stuck to a post of the daub wall behind him as he let loose an outlandish syllable in the rheumy jargon of his homeland.
In the fireplace a glowing castle of embers subsided to ash. The mahout heard the iron ticking of a kettle on the boil in...
Reviews
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Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon delves into a mysterious world of barbarians, city-states, and crafty travelers in the oddly named GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD. The book owes much to Robert E. Howard's CONAN. Andre Braugher, star of the tele?vision show "Homicide," reads the exposition-heavy book set a thousand years ago in the Khazar kingdom near the Black Sea. His delivery is straightforward but does not exploit the actor's range of talent. His performance might have been more engaging if the book had more dialogue. As it stands, the work drags in places. A rapier-wielding Jewish doctor and horse thief and his companion, a surly African ax-wielder, become involved in restoring an heir to a kingdom. Chabon is featured in a bonus afterword in the set. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
The New York Times...
"Michael Chabon can write like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader with their beauty and their style."
The Christian Science Monitor...
"[Michael Chabon] is, simply, the coolest writer in America."
The Washington Post Book World...
"[Chabon is a] stupendously gifted and accomplished writer . . . a writer not merely of rare skill and wit but of self-evident and immensely appealing generosity."
Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered...
"Whether making us laugh or making us feel the breathtaking impermanence of things, Michael Chabon keeps us wide awake and reading."
San Francisco Chronicle...
"Chabon's writing is elegant and limber."
Bookmarks...
"From his editorship of an issue of McSweeny's to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon has mined genre fiction and pop culture in pursuit of literary gold."
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