Ali and Nino

Kurban Said's Baku sits on the line between Europe and Asia, an oil city on the Caspian where a Muslim boy and a Christian girl try to build a life across faiths. The map holds the walled Old City and its Maiden Tower, the boom-era mansions and the seaside boulevard, then reaches inland to the mountain town of Shusha and closes at Ganja, as a short-lived Azerbaijani republic rises and falls.

Ali Khan Shirvanshir

The Old City, Icherisheher

Baku

The story begins inside the walled quarter of Baku, a maze of narrow lanes and flat roofs where the young narrator, son of an old Muslim family, grows up looking east toward Asia. This is the ground on which his world sits before oil money and a European war begin to pull it apart.

Opening chapters, Baku

explicit The novel is set squarely in Baku's walled Old City; this marks the centre of Icherisheher, the historic core inside the fortress walls.

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Ali Khan Shirvanshir

The Maiden Tower

Baku

The stone cylinder of the Maiden Tower stands at the seaward edge of the Old City, the emblem of Ali's Baku and of the legends that cling to it. From here the fortress looks out over the Caspian, the meeting point of the two cultures the book keeps trying to reconcile.

Baku, the Old City

explicit The Maiden Tower is a named landmark of the Old City in the novel; coordinates are the tower itself in south-east Icherisheher.

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Ali Khan Shirvanshir

The seaside boulevard

Baku

Along the Caspian shore runs the boulevard laid out in the oil-boom years, where the city walks, courts and shows itself off. It is here, between the mansions of the new rich and the open sea, that Ali's romance with the Georgian Nino plays out against a Baku poised between old and new.

Baku, the waterfront

explicit The waterfront promenade on the Caspian recurs in the novel; this marks the historic Baku Boulevard along the bay below the Old City.

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