The Secret of the Morisco is a picaresque tale of Robert, a young Englishman taken captive by the Spanish Armada in the 17th century, as he sails home after procuring an Arabic printing press in the Netherlands. Thrown into prison for nothing more than his own bad luck, Robert befriends a Christianised Moor, Yusuf, who cautiously recounts the story of his family’s flight from Spain following the Edict of Expulsion in 1609 and divulges the existence of lost Arabic manuscripts, setting Robert off on an adventure taking him from Spain to Holland, Italy, and Ottoman Syria in search of the invaluable trove.More than a thrilling story about the emergence of the Arabic printing press or lost manuscripts, The Secret of the Morisco draws heavily on events from the Scientific Revolution, the Thirty Years’ War, and the often turbulent relations with the Ottoman Empire to highlight a period of intense cultural interaction and increasing competition between Europe and the Islamic world. Memoir-like and written from Robert’s perspective, the novel interrogates notions of belonging, the permeability of boundaries, and the ambiguous dichotomy between East and West. Deeply researched and easily accessible to the general reader, The Secret of the Morisco is historical fiction at its finest and offers a unique perspective on a critical period of history.
