Baghdad, 812. A boy chooses a chest of records over his trapped father-and spends the rest of his life insisting the choice was the other way around. Samir ibn Nadir believes violence begins when words fail. His gift for reconciling Arabic, Syriac, and Greek texts carries him from his family's ruined paper workshop into the scholarly and political circles of the Abbasid court. He marries Mariam, a Christian healer who records what patients say when learned books are wrong. He befriends Tughan, a soldier taken into a military system that calls bondage service and service honor. And he gives his loyalty to a patron who promises that reason can protect belief from tyranny.
Then the court begins demanding one correct answer to a question of faith-and Samir's careful language makes the interrogation possible everywhere. The work that earns him trust also teaches power how to travel cleanly from one page to the next.
Decades later, rival caliphs divide the empire. Mariam is trapped inside a starving Baghdad. Tughan stands with the army beyond its walls. Ordered to write the city's surrender, Samir must decide whether a perfect document can save the people he loves, or whether truth survives only when no one man is allowed to own it.
The City of Truth is a historical-philosophical novel about translation, conscience, marriage, friendship, and the human cost of making certainty useful.
