The Desert - Or, The Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali al-Mammi - Albert Memmi
Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977, The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles, facing imprisonment, and narrowly escaping death, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country.