Sinai Tapestry

Book excerpt: DIVDIVSinai Tapestry, the brilliant first novel of the Jerusalem Quartet,is an epic alternate history of the Middle East in which the discovery of the original Bible links a disparate group of remarkable people across time and space/divDIV In 1840, Plantagenet Strongbow, the twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset, seven-feet-seven-inches tall and the greatest swordsman and botanist of Victorian England, walks away from the family estate and disappears into the Sinai Desert carrying only a large magnifying glass and a portable sundial. He emerges forty years later as an Arab holy man and anthropologist, now the author of a massive study of Levantine sex—and the secret owner of the Ottoman Empire./divDIV Meanwhile, Skanderbeg Wallenstein has discovered the original Bible, lost on a dusty bookshelf in the monastery library. To his amazement, it defies every truth held by the three major religions. Nearly a century later, Haj Harun, an antiquities dealer who has acted as guardian of the Holy City for three thousand years, uncovers the hidden Bible./divDIV Sinai Tapestry is the first volume of the Jerusalem Quartet, which continues with Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows,and Jericho Mosaic./divDIV/div/div