dijous, 13 de novembre del 2008

Azafrán (Saffron) by José M García Marín sold in Russia

Shortly after the Frankfurt Book Fair, last October, SalmaiaLit, on behalf of RocaEditorial, granted Russian Rights of Azafrán, by José Manuel García Marín. The novel will be published by Arabesque, an imprint of AST Group.

The year is 1252. What nowadays is Spain was then a series of Christian and Muslim kingdoms that sometimes co-existed in peace and some others did not...

Mukhtar ben Saleh, a Muslim teacher, is sick of the Christians ruling his village in the south of Spain and decides to leave it in search of another place in which he can live amongst his equals. His equipment is poor: a copy of the Koran, some clothes and the quill that was given to him by the imam.

Mukhtar will wander around the old but still splendorous al-Andalus, and his steps will lead him through the streets of its most important cities: Seville, Cordoba and Granada.

He will soon realize that his journey isn’t only physical: all over his way he finds different characters that teach him different things. Mukhtar will discover a path of wisdom in which the three religions that co-exited at the time converge: The Islam, Christianism and Judaism.

Alongside with Mukhtar we will witness the fascinating everyday life of a distant period of our History. We’ll meet a Muslim surgeon, we’ll attend a Jewish feast in Cordoba and we will see the way of life of booksellers, traders, merchants... we will also see how women had an important role in the making of a cultural and religious universe, depicted in Azafrán with elegance and precision.

Azafrán is a historical novel of self-developement, discoveries and  multiculturalism, and the story of a man who loved his fellow citizens.

“Azafrán shows us how the three religions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, contributed to the diversity that made al-Ándalus an unrepeatable place”  El País.

Rights sold in Russia (Arabesque/AST Group).