For centuries, the greatest explorers of their age were dispatched from the power-houses of Europe London, Paris and Berlin on a quest unlike any other: To be the first white Christian to visit, and then to sack, the fabled metropolis of Timbuctoo. 
 Most of them never returned alive. 
 At the height of the Timbuctoo mania, two hundred years ago, it was widely believed that the elusive Saharan city was fashioned in entirety from the purest gold everything from the buildings to the cobble-stones, from the buckets to the bedsteads was said to be made from it. 
 One winter night in 1815, a young illiterate American seaman named Robert Adams was discovered half-naked and starving on the snow-bound streets of London. His skin seared from years in the African desert, he claimed to have been a guest of the King of Timbuctoo. 
 Thought of an American claiming anything let alone the greatest prize in exploration was abhorrent in the extreme. Closing ranks against their unwelcome American guest, the British Establishment lampooned his tale, and began a campaign of discrediting him, one that continues even today. 
 An astonishing tale based on true-life endurance, Tahir Shah s epic novel Timbuctoo brilliantly recreates the obsessions of the time, as a backdrop for one of the greatest love stories ever told. Timbuctoo will be released on June 28, 2012. This is a limited edition hardback, very very high spec, and designed along the lines of the travel books of two centuries ago. It weighs 2 kilos (almost 4.5 lbs), has fabulous marbled endpapers, a silk bookmark, a pouch at the rear with inserts, and six huge fold-out maps. The paper is wood-free, and the cover embossed with raised gold type. In addition, each copy contains the clues needed to begin a treasure hunt that could result in locating one of four golden treasures of Timbuctoo. The book is a thing of extraordinary beauty, and the kind of book that will last two hundred years or more.

Timbuctoo

Tahir Shah

Secretum Mundi Publishing

Oddball and loner Oliver Quinn was raised by his uncle, the proprietor of Ozymandias & Son, New York's most bizarre emporium of Oriental rugs. Through a series of what he believes to be coincidences, Oliver discovers a portal in the basement of the shop - a portal to a magical world called Zonus. Gradually, Oliver begins to understand that everything he'd ever considered fact is fantasy, and that if he is to survive, he'll have to start thinking in an entirely new way. In reality, our world is nothing but a backwater in a colossal multiverse, where every permutation is not only possible, but certain. With the veil lifted, Oliver is introduced to the parallel life form with which we share the multiverse - the mysterious and all-powerful race of jinn. Far from the loveable blue-skinned giants projected by Hollywood, jinn are capable of wreaking terror on an unknown scale. When they go rogue, as they frequently do, they must be captured and incarcerated in the Prism, a vast penitentiary. Trapping rogue jinn is a perilous task entrusted to the Jinn Hunters, the bravest fraternity of warriors in existence. Having been accepted into the Cadenta, the training academy of Jinn Hunters, Oliver is pitted against the gravest new reality: the fact that Nequissimus, the most evil jinn in all existence, has just escaped... Born into the hallowed ancestry of the Jinnslayers, Oliver Quinn is the only man alive with a chance at defeating the great jinn, and returning him to his cell in the Prism. A cross between A Thousand and One Nights and Men in Black, THE JINNSLAYER is the second awe-inspiring novel in Tahir Shah's much-celebrated JINN HUNTER series. One of the most original books of its age, it lures the reader into a twilight zone conjured from pure imagination.

Jinn Hunter: Book Two: The Jinnslayer

Children's Books

Shah, Tahir

Science Fiction & Fantasy

For more than a century Henry Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines has inspired generations of young men to set forth in search of adventure. But long before Rider Haggard's classic, explorers, theologians and scientists scoured the known world for the source of Solomon's astonishing wealth. 
The Bible's wisest king built a temple at Jerusalem that was said to be more fabulous than any other landmark in the ancient world. Adorned with an abundance of gold, it was said to be gleaned from a mysterious land known as 'Ophir'. 
Taking his leads from a mixture of texts including the Septuagint, the earliest known form of the Bible, as well as using geological, geographical and folkloric sources, Tahir Shah sets out in search for Solomon's gold mines. For him the obvious place to look is Ethiopia, the ancient and enigmatic realm nestled in the horn of Africa. 
The ensuing journey takes Shah to a remote cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the fabulous rock-hewn churches at Lalibela. 
Then, in the south of the country, Shah discovers a massive illegal gold mine. Like something out of the Old Testament, there are thousands of men, women and children digging at the ground with their bare hands. 
In Search of King Solomon's Mines is regarded as a masterpiece of adventure, its twisting narrative itself touched with gold.

In Search of King Solomon's Mines

Travel

Africa

House of the Tiger King

South America

As a child in rural England, Tahir Shah first learned the secrets of illusion from a visiting Indian magician, the hereditary guardian of his ancestor’s tomb. More than two decades later he set out to India on a quest: to study the form of magic used across the subcontinent on a daily basis by so-called ‘godmen’.\nMaking his way to Kolkata, Tahir is taken on by Hakim Feroze, magician, illusionist, sadist, master, and irrepressible polymath, before embarking on what is described as a ‘journey of observation’.\nShah’s initiation into the brotherhood of Indian magicians makes for one of the most adventurous, enlivening, and downright bizarre travel books of its time. Lifting the lid on age-old illusions – such as human hibernation and levitation – Sorcerer’s Apprentice established Shah as one of the leading travel writers of his generation.\nNothing is what it seems in this spellbinding tale. A rollercoaster of a read from start to finish, the travelogue reveals a secret underbelly of life that thrives across India, but which most authors hardly ever notice exists.

Sorcerer's Apprentice

Religion & Spirituality

Occult & Paranormal

Enthralled by a line from the chronicle of a sixteenth-century monk which suggested that the Incas 'flew over the jungle like birds', and by the recurring theme of flying in Peruvian folklore, Tahir Shah sets out to discover whether the Incas really did fly or glide above the rainforest of Peru.\nOr was the Spanish cleric alluding to flight of a different kind - one inspired by a powerful hallucinogen, the so-called Vine of the Dead? 
After gathering equipment in London - and advice, not least from Sir Wilfred Thesiger - Shah's long quest begins. Picking up clues as he goes, the trail begins at the Atacama Desert with its immense cryptic Nazca Lines and thirty thousand mummified corpses. 
Then, on through the Peruvian hinterland of the Altiplano and, finally, to an epic river journey up the Amazon. There, lost in its seething green rainforest, he discovers the secrets of the Shuar, a tribe formerly infamous for shrinking human heads. 
Even for a traveller not unused to surreal adventure, there are many extraordinary encounters in this astounding travel book.\nGruesome but often hilarious, Trail of Feathers is peppered with madmen and dreamers, with sorcerers, con-men and jungle experts. Each one reveals a little more of the puzzle, before Tahir Shah can at last discover the truth about the Birdmen of Peru.

Trail of Feathers

Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts

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