Description

Agra, 1626. The Empress Nur Jahan stands at the height of her power — a Persian-born noblewoman who, through wit, beauty, and political genius, has become the most influential woman the Mughal Empire has ever known. Coins are struck in her name. Firmans bear her seal. Even the Emperor Jahangir, lost to opium and her quiet hand on his reign, signs what she places before him.

Into this gilded, treacherous court arrives Mirza Sahir Khorasani — a twenty-six-year-old poet from Herat, summoned to compose a diwan in the Empress’s honour. He expects to spend a season in Agra, take his bag of gold mohurs, and leave. He does not expect Nur Jahan herself to read his verses aloud in the Diwan-i-Khas. He does not expect her to summon him, alone, to the rooftop pavilion of the Anguri Bagh on a jasmine-scented night to ask, very quietly, what he meant by the seventeenth couplet. And he certainly does not expect to fall, with the careful, ruinous slowness of a man stepping into a river he cannot leave, in love with the most dangerous woman in Hindustan.

Meticulously researched and breathtakingly atmospheric, *The Empress’s Poet* recreates the perfumed, knife-edge world of the late Jahangir court — where a glance could elevate a man, and a whisper could end him. A sweeping, sensuous novel about love between unequals, the politics of desire, and the women history called queens to avoid calling them what they truly were: rulers.