A gorgeously drawn fairy tale steeped in the art and calligraphy of Islam, this massive, worlds-spanning story by Thompson — author of the similarly immense but intensely interior memoir Blankets — covers a lot of ground. You could make the argument that it covers too much: God and evil, Muhammad and Abraham, the paradise of love and the hell of environmental degradation, the traditions of the Mideast and the ways those traditions have been bastardized by Orientalist storytellers.

—Dan Kois