Some characters in novels live on through the centuries, as if they really existed. Such is the case with Scheherazade, the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, of whom there is no portrait–and for good reason–but whose first name fires the imagination, whether or not you’ve read One Thousand and One Nights. Some books are so powerful that you don’t even need to have read them to feel you know them.

The novel, a saga, is divided into three parts.

The One Who Didn’t Write: The narrator is 17 when her fabulous Aunt Anahide takes her to Venice, Europe’s most oriental city, and tries to instill in her a passion for Scheherazade, even dreaming of making her write “The True Story of Scheherazade”.

The One Who Wrote: The narrator is 50 when, with her aunt just gone, she finally really opens One Thousand and One Nights. Discovering a world.

The One Who Didn’t Read: She was 60 when it was her turn, back in Venice, to pass on the story of Scheherazade to a young woman of 18, who didn’t read.

Who, in this saga, has actually read The Arabian Nights? Not a soul, and yet…

Through these three transmissions, the famous true story of Scheherazade is written, a young woman full of courage and intrepidity, who one day volunteered to marry a king who, for three years, had every new wife he married the day before beheaded at dawn, for fear of being cheated on. How do you stop a massacre? How do you transform a monster into a man worthy of the name? By leaving the king hanging every morning in the wake of a never-ending tale, Scheherazade saves her own skin and invents literature.