A Thousand Nights

By: E.K. Johnston
Location: FIC JOH
Genre: Fantasy

Would I be prepared to sacrifice my life- so my sister could live. Big question? Probably would not have said yes when I was 14!!! This book is set in the  Ancient Middle East- a place full of colour, intrigue, steeped in history- think Arabian Nights, think Persia, think harems and magic....

"Magic, wisdom, true east, demons, princes, desert, castles, love, friendship and a healthy dose of feminism - this is the bouquet of A thousand nights".- Nastassja 

Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to my village, looking for a wife. When Lo-Melkhiin - a formidable king - arrives at her desert home, she knows that he will take her beautiful sister for a wife. Desperate to save her sister from certain death, she makes the ultimate sacrifice - leaving home and family behind to live with a fearful man. But it seems that a strange magic flows between her and Lo-Melkhiin, and night after night, she survives. Finding power in storytelling, the words she speaks are given strange life of their own. Little things, at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. But she dreams of bigger, more terrible magic: power enough to save a king ...if only she can stop her heart from falling for a monster. Set against a harsh desert backdrop, A Thousand Nights by E K Johnston is an evocative tale of love, mystery and magic that would not feel out of place if Scheherazade herself were telling it. And perhaps she is...

Lo-Melkhiin has taken a new wife, one that took the place of her sister. Her sister is more beautiful and everyone watches her, but no one watches the second sister. So she does everything she can to stand out, so that her sister will not be taken. And she is. Lo-Melkhiin comes to her that wedding night, and does nothing more than take her hands. She lives one night, and another night, and another. Soon she is queen, but she knows that something is not right with Lo-Melkhiin. He is not the same man who went out in the desert years ago, and returned with cruelty in his heart. She must stop him, and with a power she is slowly discovering, she will fight for her life, before he takes it from her.

"The world had never seen another like Lo-Melkhiin, and it had no stories to combat him. Not whole stories, but maybe there was something smaller. A thread in the story of a warrior who laid siege to a walled city. A fragment in the story of a father who had two daughters, and was forced to choose which of them to send into the desert at night... There were stories, and there were stories. No single tale that I could draw from would save my sister from a short and cruel marriage, but I had pieces aplenty. I held them in my hands like so many grains of sand, and they slipped away from me, running through my fingers, even as I tried to gather more. But I knew sand. I had been born to it and learned to walk on it... I knew that I had only to hold it for long enough, to find the right fire, and the sand would harden into glass — into something I could use.:"