On Sale: 21 March 2026
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN:9780008381394
This is the second book in Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi series, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it since it was announced. Like her Daevabad Trilogy, Chakraborty’s epic pirate fantasy series is set in an explicitly Middle Eastern, Muslim world. In a market oversaturated with Eurocentric fantasy novels full of Tolkienesque magical worlds, Chakraborty’s gorgeous and well researched novels are a refreshing and much needed addition to the field.
Amina al-Sirafi is such a loveable character. She’s so recognisably and relatably a flawed imperfect human, but one who tries so hard to be good within her own moral code. She has a complex relationship with her separated husband, she struggles as a working mother, there’s a whole set of subplots within The Tapestry of Fate which are wholly about how to have personal relationships, how to be a good leader, how to do the right thing in the face of really hard shit. But you don’t notice any of that impacting the flow of the story, it’s all there but it isn’t in the way.
In this sequel, Amina once again gets given a quest to retrieve a dangerous magical object, her on/off husband is there in his chaos demon form to, well, cause chaos, she manages to upset her Mother, her brother AND her daughter by taking on said quest, and her wonderful ship (so crucial to the novels that I think of it as a character!) ends up getting rather battered. I try to write reviews without giving spoiler alerts, because I like to read the story from the story and not from reviews, so please forgive the lack of precise detail, but this is a novel that is exquisite in it’s detail. By sheer chance the magical object happens to represent an area in which I have a lot of craft experience (fibre arts/ textiles), which did give me an extra kick from the story.
One of the things I love about Chakraborty’s books is that underpinning her glorious fiction, and her absolute skill at taking the reader on an immersive, full colour, high definition trip through the narrative, is rigorous research. There aren’t a lot of novels that come with 2-3 pages of recommended reading at the back, and I really love that she includes that. I think particularly when you’re writing in an underserved area, offering readers the opportunity to learn about the real world history that offers the foundations of the fictional world you’ve given them, really enhances the reader experience. In the case of this book, all of the fibre arts books Chakraborty recommends are ones I have either read or are on my TBR shelves, but again, I love that she does such a lot of research, and then shares that with readers.
Ultimately, The Tapestry of Fate is an action packed quest book, set in an unused setting for fantasy novels, that is written so well that reading it is like experiencing an IMAX-shot film. There are no boring bits, there were no sections where I had to put the book down to go and do something else because it was getting a bit ‘chewy’. It’s all killer, no filler, so to speak, and if you want enjoyable lady pirate hi-jinks, with highly accurate technical details, then this is definitely a book for you. Book 3 of the Adventures of Amina Al-Sarafi is being written at the moment according to this Reddit AMA (there is more details of The Tapestry of Fate in there, so be aware), and will be set in Egypt, so I am quite excited to see that one published!
Rating (out of five): 🛡️🛡️🛡️🛡️🛡️
Do Expect: Mythical beings you may not have experienced before, a really diverse cast of characters, and marine hi-jinks
Don’t Expect: A tidy ending with no cliff-hanger, a boring or predictable story
