... ambitious and original.

The finest historical fiction renders the strange grippingly familiar; so too do those rare historians whose novelistic understanding of their subject brings it to life. Christopher de Bellaigue, an acclaimed historian of the Middle East, has done just this in The Lion House, a vivid, cinematic account of the rise of Suleyman the Magnificent that is written almost entirely in the present tense.

It is all written in the present tense. This creates the obvious sense of liveliness and urgency as well as dissipating a little the slightly dead feeling the reader can experience with historical narratives, that you already know the end before you begin and there is nothing to play for. That urgency can come at a cost to your trust in the historicity of the writing and would be tricky to sustain, but shorn of index and notes, The Lion House is less than 250 pages long and Bellaigue, whose previous books include The Islamic Enlightenment, sets about the task with such confidence and skill that it works.

... although we know how the story ends, this account really grips. And it does so by bringing out the fascinating individuals, the adventure, the lurid details, the barbarities, the opulence and squalor and near misses of the story.

Neither exactly a novel nor exactly a history, it is a hard-to-classify book that assembles the known facts about the period and grouts them together with brisk and muscular prose. The method falls somewhere between mosaic, archaeology and taxidermy. Written in a sure-footed historical present, the book creates a simulacrum of the 16th century through the painstaking accumulation of attested details. Its set pieces depict sieges, naval battles, high-stakes diplomatic negotiations and the opulence of the Venetian and Ottoman courts. Above all, it revels in the display of power through money and fine objects.

From time to time, cinematically vivid tableaux halt its (literally) breakneck political intrigues. Each spangled scene...rests on a solid foundation in the primary sources — letters, journals, diplomatic reports — cited at the end.

The book does not pretend to be a scholarly biography, though de Bellaigue has read many sources and modern works, including ones in Turkish and Persian. Instead it offers a vivid presentation of events, reimagined as scenes and episodes, and structured on the interactions between a group of key characters. The model is more dramatic than historical and just as we watch actors performing in real time, so this book is written in a continuous present tense.

Around the silent sovereign revolves a constellation of colorful personalities. They are impulsive, talkative, intriguers, rebels. Bellaigue brings them to life by using the archives of the Serenissima, Venice, whose diplomats were as eager to impress their readers as modern journalists publishing clickbait, reporting gory executions and gorgeous receptions.