Ali and Nino, first published in Vienna in 1937, has been hailed as one of the enduring romantic novels of the century a relatively short book with an epic sweep. A highly involving tale of love challenged by war, often compared to Romeo and Juliet, Gone with the Wind, and Dr. Zhivago, it is as much a story of love as it is a portrait of two exotic cultures.

Ali Khan is an Islamic boy from Azerbaijan with his ancestors' passion for the desert and warrior legends, but his lover Nino, a beautiful Christian girl from Georgia, is the child with a more European sensibility. Close to one another from childhood despite admonishments from their families, the lovers spend their days in Baku on the edge of the Caspian Sea. But it is here in the city where Orient and Occident collide, that they are inevitably caught up in the events of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Both must confront the divided world that surrounds them as well as their own deepest needs.

With the funamentalist backdrop of recent years and the ethnic and social complexities that have accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ali and Nino has gained an unexpected and echoing topicality, making its remarkable story especially vivid today. At once an unforgettable tale of love, adventure and personal heroism, Ali and Nino has persisted in readers' memories just as the strange background of its author's life has continued to perplex all who look into it.

"One feels as if one had dug up buried treasure... an epic of cultural change that seems more immediate than this morning's headlines." The New York Times

"Kurban Said" is the pen name for an Austrian countess, the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels. Ali and Nino is represented by Dr. Heinz Barazon in Vienna who brings his knowledge to bear on the back jacket.