Michael Golding – författare

In his debut novel, Golding makes sense of the current AIDS crisis as he envisions another time and place transformed by a fatal horror. Take a journey back six centuries to a secluded island in the Venice lagoon--a wondrous place where superstition reigns and life and death are created by magical equations.

In the 14th century, on an Italian island called Riva di Pignoli, terrible and wonderful things happen. A corpse is washed up on the shore and is quickly hidden; a beautiful stranger arrives in possession of a miraculous secret; and spring fails to arrive.

At the age of 71, Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky has everything a tycoon in 1929 America could possibly want - except a son. Enter Benjamin, a startlingly beautiful orphan of the Depression, with a wonderful but potentially destructive gift.

A Poet of the Invisible World is the story of a boy born in thirteenth-century Persia with four ears instead of two. Orphaned as an infant, he's taken into a Sufi order, where he meets an assortment of dervishes and is placed upon a path towards spiritual awakening. He studies the Koran and the principles of Sufism. He meets his first love, a handsome youth named Vishpar. When marauders attack the lodge, however, he's swept off to a series of gruelling adventures and an assortment of shifting roles: tea boy in the court of a Spanish sultan, shepherd on a barren farm in the mountains, sybarite in a bustling city on the north coast of Africa. As he stumbles from one painful experience to the next, he grows into manhood. And when fate leads him to a Sufi order perched high in the mountains, he's ready to begin the true work of spiritual development. Now the tests are more subtle: the animosity of a fellow Sufi who has dogged him since childhood, a love affair with an acolyte who's been brought under his wing. But each trial shatters another obstacle within-and leads him on toward transcendence.