❄️ The Snow Map

Age: 18+280 pagesAn adult adventure and history novel in chapters — idea & editing by Dheiab Alawfi, written with AI assistance

In 1912 Salem al-Adani, a cook from Crater in Aden, sails on a wooden sealer to the far north of Greenland and, in a blue cave beneath the ice, reads Arabic letters carved by a Baghdad merchant eight hundred years earlier. No one believes him. A hundred and twelve years later his descendant Maryam, a virtual-world designer in Abu Dhabi, opens his old chest in a Sharjah house about to be demolished: three notebooks, a map on sealskin, an Abbasid dirham and a glass plate. From accusations of forgery to the London archives, from the Cold War to a polar storm, the search for the City of Blue Light begins. (Adults: danger, death, mild violence)

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How it begins: The First Notebook

This is the notebook of Salem bin Awad al-Adani, ship's cook, of the Crater quarter in Aden. I bought it today from a stationer's shop on King Street for sixpence. It is dear, but the old Englishman told me its paper does not tear in water, and that sailors going north buy it because the ink does not run in the damp. I do not know if he was telling the truth. But I bought it. I write in it in Arabic. Because no one here can read it. And because my uncle Sheikh Saleh, the petition-writer outside the Government House in Aden, who taught me my letters when I was eight, used to say: the man who does not write down his day, Salem, lives it only once. The man who writes it lives it twice. And I want to live this twice. Because I do not know if I will live it even once.

The lesson: Laughter does not change what lies under the ice. And a true story is the snow that does not melt

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