Description: Love stories culled from various pre-Islamic folktales and poems, drawn from ancient sources throughout the Middle East. Includes eleven tales adapted and retold from lengthy translations that provide alternatives to more common sagas.
Brief description: Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, award-winning cultural journalist, curator, and activist, born in Australia and educated in Latin America, Europe, and Central Asia.. She studied history and folklore, has traveled extensively throughout the Muslim world and is the author or editor of fifteen books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam, The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore and Politics, Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace, and, with Ashraf Zahedi, Book of the Disappeared: the Quest for Transnational Justice.
Review Quotes: "Love is covered in startling breadth in The Jewel and the Ember, a shimmering anthology that gathers tales of devotion and treachery."--Foreword Reviews