All five volumes of Tariq Ali's acclaimed Islam Quintet - Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Book of Saladin, The Stone Woman, A Sultan in Palermo, Night of the Golden Butterfly - in a shrink-wrapped set at a discounted price.

Tariq Ali tells us the story of the aftermath of the fall of Granada by narrating a family sage of those who tried to survive after the collapse of their world. Particularly deft at evoking what life must have been like for those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom. "This is a novel that have something to say, and says it well." - Guardian

The final volume in Tariq Ali's acclaimed cycle of historical novels. Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet - Tariq Ali's much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun - known as Plato - an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where 'human dignity has become a wreckage.' Plato, who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight, now wants his life story written. As the tale unravels we meet Plato's London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. 'Naughty' Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals leads to her flight to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she is hailed as the . Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie's family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade, as Sultan Suleiman. Night of the Golden Butterfly reveals Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating. .

The fourth novel in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet is set in medieval Palermo, a Muslim city rivalling Baghdad and Cordoba in size and splendour. The year is 1153. The Normans are ruling Siqqiliya, but Arab culture and language dominate the island and the court. Sultan Rujari (King Roger) surrounds himself with Muslim intellectuals, several concubines, and an administration presided over by gifted eunuchs. The bishops, expecting to be at the pinnacle of power, are angered by the decadence of the court. In this captivating novel, Tariq Ali charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but, confronted by the common people of Noto and Catania, his conscience is troubled. A Sultan in Palermo is a mythic novel in which pride, greed, and lust intermingle with resistance and greatness. Set in the past, it has haunting resonance today.

Tariq Ali's latest novel is a rich and teeming chronicle set in twelfth-century Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem. "The Book of Saladin" is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and retainers so that he might present a full portrait in the Sultan's memoirs. A series of interconnected stories follows, tales brimming over with warmth, earthy humor and passions in which ideals clash with realities and dreams are confounded by desires. At the heart of the novel is an affecting love affair between the Sultan's favored wife, Jamila, and the beautiful Halina, a later addition to the harem. The novel charts the rise of Saladin as Sultan of Egypt and Syria and follows him as he prepares, in alliance with his Jewish and Christian subjects, to take Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. This is a medieval story, but much of it will be uncannily familiar to those who follow events in contemporary Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. Betrayed hopes, disillusioned soldiers and unrealistic alliances form the backdrop to "The Book of Saladin."

A brilliant family saga stretching from the Russian Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet UnionFor some East Germans, the fall of communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it. The nation may be reunified, but the life of former East German dissident Vladimir Meyer has fallen apart. His wife has deserted him. He has been fired from his university for being a Marxist. Vlady wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family's long and passionate involvement with communism really meant. This is interwoven with the story of Ludwik, the Polish secret agent who recruited Philby, and of Gertrude, Vlady's mother, whose desire for Ludwik is matched only by her devotion to the Communist ideal. As the plot unfolds through the political upheavals of the twentieth century, Vlady describes the hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution and discovers the almost unbearable truth about...

Each year, when the weather in Istanbul becomes unbearable, the family of Iskender Pasha, a re-tired Ottoman notable, retires to its summer palace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. It is 1899 and the last great Islamic empire is in serious trouble. A former tutor poses a question which the family has been refusing to confront for almost a century: ‘Your Ottoman Empire is like a drunken prostitute, neither knowing nor caring who will take her next. Do I exaggerate, Memed?’ The history of Iskender Pasha’s family mirrors the growing degeneration of the Empire they have served for the last five hundred years. This passionate story of masters and servants, school-teachers and painters, is marked by jealousies, vendettas and, with the decay of the Empire, a new generation which is deeply hostile to the half-truths and myths of the ‘golden days.’The Stone Woman is the third novel of Tariq Ali’s ‘Islam Quartet’. Like its predecessors—Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and The Book of Saladin—its power lies both in the story-telling and the challenge it poses to stereotyped images of life under Islam.