The Begum’s story, her challenge, had taken him by surprise. It had been so very long since somebody had matched him and, truth be told, outstripped him. He hadn’t imagined being bested. What a shocking joy it was to be defeated, to be in love again.

It is the 1700s and the forces of Ahmad Shah Abdali have destroyed the glorious city of Delhi. Abandoned by fate and fortune, a storyteller finds himself at an isolated casbah a day’s ride from the city. When the Begum of the casbah invites him to stay and share a story, he tells her the tale of two brothers, Taka and Wara—wolf and boy—a tale of love and loyalty, and the hurt, fear and distrust that come when love remains unrecognized.

The Begum is provoked into responding with a story of her own—the tale of Aresh and Barab and a friendship that transcends death. What follows in this many-layered tale is a duel of narratives, each reinforcing something different—love, loyalty, friendship, anguish, need, betrayal, sacrifice and loss; each tale drawing the Begum and the storyteller deeper into a forbidden desire; each story transporting the reader to an unforgettable world.

Using evocative prose and exquisite imagery,Omair Ahmad’s The Storyteller’s Tale explores the delicate nature of human relationships, demonstrating that there is always more than one way of looking at life; that no story is ever just that, or ever truly finished.

Read the Prologue of The Storyteller’s Tale here:

They had destroyed his house.

Ahmad Shah Abdali’s men had devastated the whole of Delhi and his house had only been a small one. Its destruction would hardly have registered on the rampaging Afghans in their search for loot and pillage. It had not been a great house; only the fame of his poetry had led the noble and the rich to his door. They had been lavish with their praise, and stingy with their purses. It had meant a meagre income, a beggar’s or a poet’s, or that of a beggarly poet’s. But his dwelling had at least kept the rain off his head, and the sun off his back.

Now he had nothing, or he had his freedom. It depended on how he looked at it, he supposed. He had tried to find a foothold in this city. In his poetry he spoke of friendship, of love, of all those things that he would never have openly admitted to in the small town he came from. But in the many chambers of music and dance in Delhi the word ‘love’ was spoken of in many ways, it was nothing but a currency of exchange, of looks and glances, and promises that were never truly what they pretended to be. Here, love was a thing to be done many times.

But when he had opened his mouth to speak, the words had come out all wrong, all of them, in every which way. They had tumbled out of him, heavy with longing, wrapped in a fire that is a stranger to the light laughter of the city. The unexpectedness of speaking his own truth had stunned him.

Almost twenty years had passed, and in the end he had exactly what he had when he first arrived: his stories, his freedom and the open road before him.