The Collector of Worlds

“Iliya Troyanov has turned Burton’s unbelievable life into believable fiction, achieving a rounded and satisfying portrait that traditional biography could never match.”
—New York Times Book Review

The Collector of Worlds is a fictionalized account of the infamous life and times of Sir Richard Francis Burton—the British colonial officer stationed in India who made the Haj to Mecca, discovered the source of the Nile, spoke twenty-nine languages, and translated A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. The winner of the fiction prize of Germany’s Leipzig Book Fair in 2006 and the Berlin Literary Award, The Collector of Worlds is a brilliant re-imagining of a richly eventful, truly incredible life.