“Fate passes back and forth through us, like a cobbler’s needle through the leather he shapes.” For Tanios, a child of the Lebanese mountains, fate is first marked by the mystery surrounding his birth: as the son of the breathtakingly beautiful Lamia, rumors swirl throughout the country about the identity of his true father. Fate will strike again in the 1830s, when the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and England are vying for control of this country destined for turmoil—on the day when the assassination of a religious leader forces Tanios into exile...

Blending history and legend, human wisdom and folly, the author of *Léon l’Africain* and *Le Premier Siècle après Béatrice* takes us on a marvelous fictional journey that earned him the 1993 Prix Goncourt. A marvelous storyteller. A land blessed by God but hostile to men of good will, Tanios’s Lebanon is a blend of orange blossom water and the smell of gunpowder. As you read *The Rock of Tanios*, the Orient draws closer.