The Sultan’s Daughter

Description

It is 1866 and Zanzibar is momentarily quiet after a rebellion against the Sultan. Sayyida Salmé waits in the harem hoping to be forgiven for her part in the uprising against her brother. When she hears merchant Heinrich Ruete singing from across the narrow Stone Town street, Salmé lifts her veil to possibility.

Set against the backdrop of the slave trade and the impossible wealth of the Sultans of Zanzibar, Salmé’s story of forbidden love unfolds dramatically and takes her further into exile. The Sultan’s Daughter follows real life events. It is a story of great love, and of great loss.

“Curious, courageous and rebellious, Sayyida Salmé of Zanzibar is vividly imagined in this compelling novel. This is a nuanced portrayal of a woman who chooses love but is pulled in every direction by different cultures, countries, languages and religions.” – Debra Adelaide

“Casts an ironic eye on Western fascination with the East … in a fascinating and highly readable fiction.” – Elizabeth Webby

Jane Downing was born in Australia but was taken to live on Manus Island three weeks later. She has since lived in Tanzania, Ireland, Indonesia, the (then) USSR, China, the Marshall Islands and Guam, as well as Australia. While living and working in the Marshall Islands, where truth was often stranger than fiction, she began to write.

Jane’s short stories have been widely published in journals around Australia and overseas, including in Southerly, Westerly, Overland, The Big Issue, Griffith Review, UTS Anthology, Australian Short Stories, Antipodes (US), Headland (NZ), Kunapipi (Denmark), Paris Transcontinental (France) and Silverfish (Malaysia). In 2016 she was one of two Australians shortlisted, out of nearly 4000 entries from 47 countries, for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her poetry has been published in Cordite, Rabbit, Poetrix, the Canberra Times and Best Australian Poems (2004 & 2015).

A collection of her short stories, Searching for the Volcano (fourW press), was released in 1999 and her two novels – The Trickster (2003) and The Lost Tribe (2005) – were published by Pandanus Books at the Australian National University. Her novel Yack was Commended in the Jim Hamilton Unpublished Manuscript Award, as part of the Federation of Australian Writers National Literary Awards, 2016. Most recently a collection of her poetry, When Figs Fly, was published by Close-Up Books in 2019.