We pretty regularly get people asking for recs in the under-utilized genre of fantasy pirates. I’m very happy to report that The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is not only a new one in that category, but it’s awesome.
This is the first book in a new series (I’m guessing the plan is for 5 books, for reasons I will not be sharing) from S.A. Chakraborty, author of City of Brass (now publishing using her first name). It concerns, as one might expect, the adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, a pirate captain in the Indian Ocean during the 13th century. She had achieved quite a bit of infamy before retiring to raise her daughter, 10 years before the book starts. But she has to go back to sea when a wealthy woman (mother of a dead former crewman of Amina’s) uses a combination of bribes and threats to induce Amina to go and rescue her granddaughter/her shipmate’s daughter from the Frankish Crusader who has kidnapped her. So Amina is off to get the gang back together, get her ship back, and have one more adventure.
This book has a lot going for it. Let’s start with the setting. This was during the middle of the Islamic Golden Age, and the Indian Ocean sea lanes were a cultural melting pot linking Africa, the Middle East, India, and China. I’m always a sucker for a book with an underutilized setting, and this is a good one. The characters are great; not only Amina herself, who is cynical and snarky and utterly wonderful. There’s also her first mate Tinbu, a rakish Indian former slave; her navigator Majed, a Somali family man who dreams of voyaging beyond the edge of the map; and Dalila, the Iraqi Christian poisoner, assassin, alchemist, and all around Solver of Problems in Creative and Sometimes Explosive Ways.
While the book touches on a great deal of larger issues (most notably questions of gender, unsurprisingly) this isn’t a book that will particularly challenge you. Instead, this is a book that carries you along on a capital-A Adventure. Though there will certainly be sequels, this also works well as a standalone. Sequels are set up, but this ends well by itself.
Bumping City of Brass up the queue after this.