Rannamaari

Description

Every month the sea demands a bride. This month, a stranger answers.

Mahal, in the Maldive Islands, 1153. Once a month something rises from the sea, shining like a ship hung with lamps, and a girl from the farming villages is dressed as a bride and left alone in the temple on the rock to meet it. The King calls it the price of the islands’ safety. No girl has ever come back.

Yusuf is a scholar’s son from Berbera, scarred by a war in the mountains of Dogor and stranded in the islands, selling sheep in the market to pay off his debts. Then the King’s soldiers come for Maya, the sharp-tongued girl of the family who took him in.

Against the King, the court and the fear of a whole island, Yusuf offers to take her place. Carrying the Book he learnt by heart as a boy, he will sit through one night alone in the temple and wait for what comes out of the sea.

Drawing on the account of Ibn Battuta and on Somali tradition, Rannamaari reimagines the legend of how the Maldives came to Islam: a story of courage, faith and the terror of the deep.