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• “Even if you have visited Granada and walked the labyrinthine ways of the Albayzín, Nightingale makes you want to go there again, to see it with new eyes.”

  —The New York Times Sunday Book Review

• “…this isn’t a conventional piece of flit lit by an expat intent on sending up the locals while tending to his smallholding. From sensual celebration of the garden in his carmen, Nightingale moves on to scholarly consideration of the place of the garden in Moorish culture, the history of the barrio beyond it, and then the glories of Al-Andalus, visiting ‘provinces of mind and experience’ from medicine to music.”
  —Michael Kerr, The Telegraph

• “In flowing precise poetic speech, Stephen Nightingale bequeaths us the beautiful and tragic essence of Spanish history, philosophy, and literature, especially poetry, mystical and secular, with Lorca in his Granada…A profound delight.”

  —Willis Barnstone, author of The Restored New Testament and Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet

• “…this is an exuberant and beautifully written book and as packed with information as a pomegranate is with seeds.”

  —Eric Ormsby, The Wall Street Journal

• “the rarest delight—a book that is as wise as it is vibrant and alive. ”

  —Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

• “One of the delicious literary genres is the book about a writer’s love affair with a city. Mary McCarthy’s Stones of Florence and Edmund White’s Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris come to mind. Steven Nightingale’s Granada takes its place in that radiant company.”

  —Robert Hass, author of What Light Can Do and The Apple Trees at Olema

• “This is a sensitively written book written by a very fortunate American author who records his visit to Andalusia (Spain) with his family to discover the immense gift to civilization the earlier Spanish community has been. I can certainly recommend this book to all who have yet to learn how vibrant and productive the integration of Judaism, Christianity and Islam can be.”

  —Keith Critchlow, author of Islamic Patterns and The Hidden Geometry of Flowers

• “Thanks to Steven Nightingale’s glorious and inspiring book we can glimpse what life might become were we not plagued, as we are in these modern times, by religious fundamentalism and hyper mechanized tools of war.”

  —Jane Vandenburgh, author of The Wrong Dog Dream

• “Each page of this deeply personal book is a revelation, and a confirmation that darkness is never permanent. Darkness begets beauty. Nightingale writes that conviction into every sentence.”

  —Robert Leonard Reid, author of Artic Circle and Mountains of the Great Blue Dream

• “I cannot remember the last time I have read a story that is literally blood and truth born across two millennia of human understanding. Like a wind from the Sufi masters, it will shake the most austere and humane alike.”

  —Shaun T. Griffin, author of This is What the Desert Surrenders

• “Makes every sentence sparkle…This book is a love story, a history book, an homage to victims of intolerance and mistrust, a celebration of the magic of human achievement. Read it then book your flight.”

  —The Bookbag

• “A romantic homage to a city ‘perfected by catastrophe’ and transformed into a place of ‘concentrated joy’.”

  —Kirkus

• “GRANADA is exalted with passion, elegance and historical rigour in this delightful account.”
  

  —Geographical Magazine

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