The fairy tale, made real — for readers 12 and up.
Everyone knows the story. Sinbad's crew lands on a green island, lights a fire to cook their supper, and the island wakes, and dives, and is gone. It's a wonderful story. It's also, once you're past a certain age, a little hard to believe.
So take away the magic. What's left is worse — because it could happen.
Twelve hundred years ago, far out on the Indian Ocean, a foolish young trader who has gambled everything on one last cargo steps ashore with his shipmates onto a low green island no chart shows — and slowly realizes there is no rock under the weed, no roots under the grass, and sea-water welling up in his footprints. It is not an island. It is a sandbank, uncovered by the low tide. And when the tide turns and comes back in, fast, it takes the fire, the water-butts, and half the crew with it — and the current sweeps Sinbad away as his ship cuts its cable and claws off the shoal to keep from wrecking, until its sail is a speck, and then nothing at all.
SINBAD AND THE LIVING ISLAND is the first of THE TRUE VOYAGES — the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, retold as realistic thrillers with the magic stripped out and the danger left in. There are no monsters in these pages, only the real things that frightened sailors long ago turned into monsters because the truth was somehow worse: a sandbank that drowns the ground you stand on; a court more dangerous than a storm; a name that means the difference between a fortune and a rope. (The sailors who lived told it, ever after, as an island that was a great fish, and woke, and dived. Sinbad was on it. He tells you what it really was.) It is told in Sinbad's own voice — an old and immensely rich man in Baghdad, answering a poor young porter who wants to know why God gives some men so much and others so little, by telling him exactly what the wealth cost.
Real ships. Real winds. Real ports. Invented danger, of the kind that could have been true.
For readers of Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider and Charlie Higson's Young Bond — and for anyone who has outgrown fairy tales but not the thrill of them.
A complete, standalone adventure. Six more voyages to come, each one worse.
Contents
Part I — The Tide
1. The Gate · 2. The Green Shore · 3. The Tide · 4. Open Water · 5. The Tide-Line Horses · 6. The Balhara's Harbour
Part II — The Frame
7. The Register · 8. The Snare · 9. Blood in the Night · 10. The Weight of Evidence · 11. The Starving Dark
Part III — The Foreign Leaf
12. The Foreign Leaf · 13. The Princess
Part IV — The Way Home
14. Pardoned, Not Cleared · 15. The Ship from Home · 16. The Proof · 17. Fire on the Water · 18. Baghdad
Plus an Afterword — "What Was Real" — separating the true history from the invented danger.
Ages 12–15. No gore, no romance, no bad language — real peril, real courage, and a real cost. Entirely a work of fiction, built on a tale far older than any of us.