YoussefFjouji29
ALL SAILS
A Novel by Nizar Assam
Historical Fiction · Adventure · 1723
London, 1723. Nizar Assam is twenty-five years old, the son of an Arab scholar worked to death by the British Empire. Invisible in the city that consumed his parents, he scrubs tables at a dockside tavern and carries two things: his father's compass and a promise to his wife Yara, waiting half a world away in the mountains of Syria. The promise is simple - two years. Then he will follow her home, rich enough to buy back the dignity the Empire stripped from his family.
But the Crown has other plans. Exiled in chains and bound for the colonies, Nizar finds himself locked in the hold of a prison ship alongside three strangers who will change everything: a brilliant, terrified literature student who quotes Shakespeare at gunpoint; a freed slave forged in violence and quiet loyalty; and a silver-tongued Argentine gunman who laughs while the cannons roar. When a storm gives them one impossible chance, they seize it - and steal the ship.
They name her Majdouline, after the daughter Nizar's mother never had. They call themselves the Pícaros. And they sail straight into legend.
What follows is two years of waterspouts and warships, pirate councils and corrupt admirals, stolen gold and hard-won brotherhood. A crew of outsiders - Arab, Black, British, Argentine - who were thrown away by empires and decided to build something the empires couldn't touch. All while a woman sits on a stone terrace in the Syrian mountains, writing poetry to the stars and counting the days until her husband comes home.
All Sails is a sweeping historical adventure about empire and resistance, the mathematics of survival, and the long, violent, beautiful voyage back to the person waiting for you. It asks what a person is owed by a world that took everything from them - and what it truly costs to go collect.