Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller

Finding Aladdin is a tale full of strange and wonderful twists that celebrates one of the world's greatest storytellers.

When The Thousand and One Nights were first translated into European languages in the 1700s, they caused a sensation—and none more so than "Aladdin," the tale of a good-for-nothing layabout who happened on a magic lamp. Always the most popular of the Nights stories, "Aladdin" mystified scholars for 300 years; while they could trace other tales from Arab and Persian folklore, this one seemed to have been charmed out of thin air.

Then a tattered, anonymous manuscript was discovered in the Vatican. It revealed Aladdin's creator to be Hanna Diab, a young Syrian who had travelled to Paris with a French treasure hunter. Even more amazing, it showed that Hanna had conjured the story from his own extraordinary adventures.

In a captivating narrative of literary deduction, Matthew Teller restores authorship to a master storyteller.