Gentlemen Of The Road

Gentlemen Of The Road Michael Chabon Michael Chabon’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay sprang from an early passion for the
derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic
books. Now once more mining the rich past Chabon summons
the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures–from The
Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd
and the Gray Mouser stories–in a wonderful new novel
brimming with breathless action raucous humor
cliff-hanging suspense and a cast of colorful characters
worthy of Scheherazade’s most tantalizing tales. They’re
an odd pair to be sure: pale rail-thin black-clad Zelikman
a moody itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear and
ex-soldier Amram a gray-haired giant of a man as quick
with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a sharpened
battle-ax. Brothers under the skin comrades in arms they
make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains
circa A.D. 950 living as they please and surviving however
they can–as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced
bamboozlers cheerfully separating the gullible from their
money. No strangers to tight scrapes and close shaves
they’ve left many a fist shaking in their dust tasted
their share of enemy steel and made good any number of
hasty exits under hostile circumstances. None of which has
necessarily prepared them to be dragooned into service as
escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire.
Usurped by his brutal uncle the callow and decidedly
ill-tempered young royal burns to reclaim his rightful
throne. But doing so will demand wicked cunning outrageous
daring and foolhardy bravado . . . not to mention an army.
Zelikman and Amram can at least supply the former. But are
these gentlemen of the road prepared to become generals in
a full-scale revolution? The only certainty is that
getting there–along a path paved with warriors and whores
evil emperors and extraordinary elephants secrets
swordplay and such stuff as the grandest adventures are
made of–will be much more than half the fun.