Tom Reiss – författare

The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world.Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said' when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was its supposed author? And why was he so forgotten that no one could agree on the simplest facts about him?For five years, Reiss tracked Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century - of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2013‘Completely absorbing’ Amanda Foreman'Enthralling’ Guardian‘The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of courseare fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration forthe swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas’s own father, Alex - the sonof a marquis and a black slave... He achieved a giddy ascent from privatein the Dragoons to the rank of general; an outsider who had grown upamong slaves, he was all for Liberty and Equality. Alex Dumas was thestuff of legend’ Daily MailSo how did such this extraordinary man get erased by history? Why arethere no statues of ‘Monsieur Humanity’ as his troops called him? TheBlack Count uncovers what happened and the role Napoleon played inDumas’s downfall. By walking the same ground as Dumas - from Haiti tothe Pyramids, Paris to the prison cell at Taranto – Reiss, like the novelistbefore him, triumphantly resurrects this forgotten hero.‘Entrances from first to last. Dumas the novelist would be proud’Independent‘Brilliant’ Glasgow Herald