Jasmine, Lady of the Arabs

In the East, storytelling permeates life in a way that no longer happens in most of the Western world. It is a form of entertainment which has changed little over thousands of years, in which every aspect of life is turned into a story or a long evoked joke. Despite the popularity of the tales of the Arabian Nights, there is a wealth of stories from this part of the world which have remained unknown in the West, and this new collection, presents fourteen tales from Egypt, a land of magic and mysticism in the old Eastern tradition. The charm of Egyptian tales is that they mix together the supernatural and the mundane, the tragic and the comical, with the more prosaic elements never allowing flights of fancy or traits of idealism to get out of hand. Good does not always prevail, while craftiness and cunning often do - but even that is sometimes undermined by yet another twist of fate. Just such a story is that of The Prince who Fell in Love, an elevated love story which contains both the humorous and the ridiculous, as well as the sublime.