Song of Ancient Lovers

In this sweeping and lyrical narrative from Restrepo (The Dark Bride), a South American writer retraces a journey once taken by the Queen of Sheba. Bos Mutas has been obsessed with Sheba from an early age. His fixation takes him to Yemen, where he’s denied entry at the airport after telling a customs agent that he’s there to “search for the Queen of Sheba.” A parallel story follows Sheba from her birth, when her mother, known as the Maiden, calls her Goat Foot due to the twisted limb she’s born with. Several years after Sheba’s birth, the Maiden orders the servants to bury her alive. The young princess survives and goes on to travel across what is now Yemen, gaining strength and power by cultivating the evergreen Boswellia sacra tree, known for its curative frankincense resin. She then catches the eye of Solomon, the “wildly handsome” king of Judea, who attempts to woo and marry her. Back in the present, Bos manages to get a Somali midwife to bail him out of trouble, and she takes him in Sheba’s footsteps through the refugee camps that dot the landscape, where disease and poverty run rampant. As Bos likens Sheba to Frida Kahlo and Patti Smith, Restrepo conveys the queen’s mythology in powerful prose (“muse to poets, to sleepwalkers, to mystics and punks; the goddess of drug addicts, of the dying, of geniuses and illuminati; a prophetess among lunatics and sages; the stormy moods of artists and depressives”). It’s an undeniable ode to an inspiring figure. Agent: Thomas Colchie, Colchie Agency. (Dec.)