I wonder if I will have better luck with some of Kurban Said’s other works, but the story I am actually most interested in is the author’s own. Well-written, deep, meaningful and challenging, Ali and Nino is, but perhaps this is just a sad case of right book, wrong reader. I thought him a chump and her a moody drip, and whilst this means they are perhaps ideally suited, it did not suit me. I know I am that person rejecting Michelin Star cuisine on such arbitrary grounds as ‘I don’t like eggs’. It is pedantic of me, I know, to judge this book (the national book of Azerbaijan, no less) by my paltry standards. I do actually like the way it is very difficult to close this story in your hands. There is something inherently challenging about this novel, and I got the sense that the author enjoyed it. And the point of Said’s novel isn’t likeability.

It’s hard to write a loved-up couple in a way that renders them anything other than insufferable. The themes tackled, together with the beautiful prose and setting initially carried the novel high in my estimation, but my God. Me and Nino, a Christian, who eats with knife and fork, has laughing eyes and wears filmy silk stockings. May he be merciful and let me die here, in the same street, in the same house where I was born. God let me be born here, a Muslim of the Shiite faith, in the religion of Imam Dshafar. I love these soft night murmurs, the moon over the flat roofs, and the hot quiet afternoons in the mosque’s courtyard with its atmosphere of silent meditation. Our old town is full of secrets and mysteries, hidden nooks and little alleys. It is in no way seedy, indulgent or (God forbid) the manifestation of its author’s fantasies. There are a few mildly erotic moments, but this is a book that aspires towards literary merit. It is an erudite multicultural, interracial romance, more cerebral than steamy, and I felt its higher merits stemmed from the wider themes. It is about culture, class, the march of time, and war. And in truth, this novel is about much more than love. Though not quite in the dire straits of paranormal romance, it is true to say that the field of historical romance can be a mire, more mud than flowers. Love interests are so often anything but debonair and dashing.Īli and Nino is not the best I have read, but it is far from the worst. I’ve been there enough to tell you it isn’t all roses. Whether Eva Ibbotson’s sweet stories during my early teens, or Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which I discovered at twenty, I have always delved into this genre. The historical romance and I are far from strangers to one another.

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