The Caliph's House

Wonderfully written, critically acclaimed account of the author's struggle to restore a house and set up home in Morocco

A wonderfully entertaining book - Tahir Shah's talent is to make you laugh while you are admiring the insights given by his most original and lively view of life.

Funny, moving, fast-paced and thoughtful, it confirms Shah as one of the best travel writers of his generation...a rich mosaic of a book as intricate, complex and beautiful as the Arabian Nights world it 
describes

Reading about restoring houses overseas can be as tedious as watching paint dry...yet I can't fault this joyful and resplendent addition to the genre. Shah writes without artifice or condescension, his language is fluent and direct. His characters leap off the page...I couldn't put the book down.

A book full of charm and humour, elevated by a consistent sense of the beauty and mystery of everyday life. What also shines through the narrative is the author's decency and respect for the people and the cultures he encounters, the sort of qualities we like to think of as fundamentally British ...a tribute to our potential for understanding and learning to live with irreconcilable differences

Shah...with good humour and wit...gives a vivid evocation of the spirit of the place...The Caliph's House is charmingly escapist, and combines the pleasures of good property porn with those of the best travel writing

Painted with a novelist's rather than a reporter's eye...His descriptions are entertaining, his dialogue often hilarious.

An extraordinary tale of exploratory daring, insatiable curiosity and excruciating humour...written with tremendous verve, colour, compassion and wisdom, it's a magical story...Don't miss this gem of a book.

A year abroad, a house rebuilt, but with a difference. Extremely odd characters and the narrative drive of a good novel. Very funny.

Endlessly fascinating...Shah's own heritage as both Afghan and Briton blesses him with a unique and penetrating point of view

Elegantly woven. The dominant colours are luminous...sheer delight

Alluring...an exotic and thought-provoking read.

Maximum splendour, maximum squalor...Enlivened by well-wrought descriptions of life in Casablanca: a place suspended between modernity and the Middle Ages, between Europe and Africa.

Highly readable...Shah writes an outrageously black comedy with the straightest of poker faces

Tahir Shah was born into an Anglo-Afghan family, with roots in the mountain stronghold of the Hindu Kush. Shah's ten books have chronicled a series of fabulous journeys. He lives with his wife and two children in Casablanca. 
 
Visit his website: www.tahirshah.com

Look into the eyes of a jinn and you stare into the depths of your own soul... 
Writer and film-maker Tahir Shah - in his 30s, married, with two small children - was beginning to wilt under brash, cramped, ennervating British city life. Flying in the face of friends' advice, he longed to fulfil his dream of finding a place bursting with life, colour, history and romance - somewhere far removed from London - in which to raise a family. Childhood memories of holidaying with his parents, and of a grandfather he barely knew, led him to Morocco and to 'Dar Khalifa', a sprawling and, with the exception of its jinns, long-abandoned residence on the edge of Casablanca's shanty town that, rumour had it, once belonged to the city's Caliph. 
And so begins Tahir Shah's gloriously vivid, funny, affectionate and compelling account of how he and his family - aided, abetted and so often hindered by a wonderful cast of larger-than-life local characters: guardians, gardeners, builders, artisans, bureacrats and police (not forgetting the jinns, the spirits that haunt the house) - returned the Caliph's House to its former glory and learned to make this most exotic and alluring of countries their home. 
The Caliph's House is a story of home-ownership abroad - full of the attendant dramas, anxieties and frustrations - but it is also much more. Woven into the narrative is the author's own journey of self-discovery, of learning about a grandfather he hardly knew, and of coming to love the magical, multi-faceted, contradictory country that is Morocco.

Tahir Shah

Inspired and funny...this beguiling book shows that there has never been a better time to value the free-thinking storytelling tradition within Islam

A refreshingly innocent and exuberant travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

A refreshingly innocent and exuberent travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

Shortly after the 2005 London bombings, Tahir Shah was thrown into a Pakistani prison on suspicion of spying for Al-Qaeda. What sustained him during his terrifying, weeks-long ordeal were the stories his father told him as a child in Morocco. 
Inspired by this, on his return to his adopted homeland he embarked on an adventure worthy of the mythical Arabian Nights, going in search of the stories and storytellers that have nourished this most alluring of countries for centuries. Wandering through the medinas of Fez and Marrakech, criss-crossing the Saharan sands and tasting the hospitality of ordinary Moroccans, he collected a treasury of traditional stories recounted by a vivid and eccentric cast of characters: from master masons who work only at night to Sufi wise men who write for soap operas and Tuareg guides addicted to reality TV. Himself a link in the chain of scholars and teachers who have passed such tales down from father to son, mother to daughter, Shah reveals a world and a way of thinking that most visitors to Morocco barely know exist.

Tahir Shah

Praise for In Arabian Nights

Inspired and funny...this beguiling book shows that there has never been a better time to value the free-thinking storytelling tradition within Islam

A refreshingly innocent and exuberant travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

A refreshingly innocent and exuberent travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

Inspired and funny...this beguiling book shows that there has never been a better time to value the free-thinking storytelling tradition within Islam

A refreshingly innocent and exuberant travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

A refreshingly innocent and exuberent travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

Inspired and funny...this beguiling book shows that there has never been a better time to value the free-thinking storytelling tradition within Islam

A refreshingly innocent and exuberant travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

A refreshingly innocent and exuberent travel narrative about his quest to understand how stories work, where they come from and if they still matter

Books by Tahir Shah

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