Dreams For Sale Along the Silk Road
When I was a child, place names from history captivated me: Mohenjo Daro, Samarkand, Pompeii. They rolled off the tongue, promising visions larger than life. Among them was the name of a desert in China—Taklamakan. Its waves of sand formed crescent shapes that kept shifting and forming, over and over, covering an expanse so wide a person could see no end to it. Once you entered this world of sand dunes, you couldn’t leave.
The Taklamakan was just one enchanting spot along what has come to be called the Silk Road: a network of trade and travel routes that opened up rich cultural exchanges and in the process, changed history. Languages shifted. Glassmaking entered China. Paper made its way west. Bandits and monks, traders and adventurers traversed these routes, leaving stories scattered in their wake along a stretch of land so vast it straddled continents.
This delicious merging of vast and scary is nimbly captured in a book that manages to combine rigorous historical research and knowledge with a ripping good tale: The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri (2024 Newbery Honor). Omar, a young monk of uncertain religious affiliation (Zoroastrian-adjacent, perhaps?), falls into the hands of a voluble storyteller, Samir. Samir turns out to have an eye on opportunity and a striking lack of scruples to match. He promptly names his new charge Monkey and burdens him with the task of thwarting assassins along the fabled Silk Road. Omar is 11—how’s this going to work out?
Nayeri (author of Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story) has created a novel that navigates a turbulent history through the voice of its young narrator. He uses the youthful narrative voice to open windows to the place and time. Shantranj is here, ancestor to modern chess. So are weapons galore, material cultures of all kinds, and a dazzling array of people from the Middle East to India to China, along with their religions, all jostling for the hearts of believers.
But at its heart this is a book about storytelling itself—how it envelops and crafts and carries whole worlds, how it transforms and is transformed and promises to transform the reader. The same sleight of hand that enriched Everything Sad… is evident here, along with a playful delight in language. In the protagonist’s agile, restless pre-teen mind, innocence and knowingness are perfectly combined.
