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BookBrowse Reviews Gentlemen of the Road: Brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade's most tantalizing tales

Gentlemen of the Road
A Tale of Adventure
by Michael Chabon
Paperback, Sep 2008,
224 pages.
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The word "swashbuckling" was invented for this novel. In antique, jewel-toned words ("bambakion," "buskin, "bodkin") and sentences as meandering and adventuresome as the plot itself, Gentlemen of the Road gallops after Amram and Zelikman, a mismatched pair of fortune-hunters in tenth-century Khazaria. They are far from your average adventurers—Amram is an Abyssinian who looks like a thug, carries a Viking ax named Mother-Defiler, and behaves like royalty, and Zelikman is a moody, ascetic German Jew with an abiding affection only for his horse. Their small-time swindles take a turn for the extraordinary when a foundling they've been conscripted to deliver to distant relatives turns out to be an orphaned prince bent on revenging his...
Beyond the Book
The Lost Empire of Khazaria

Khazaria (map) was an empire founded by semi-nomadic Turks in the 7th century. Khazaria was a strong ally of the Byzantine Empire and enemies of the Crimean Goths. By the time of its decline in the 10th century, Khazaria covered much of what is now southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the Caucasus, and the Crimea. Between 965 and 969, approximately the time period of Gentlemen of the Road, the Khazars were invaded by Russian...
This review was originally published in November 2007, and has been updated for the September 2008 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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