A Kenyan Billy Goats Gruff

What if Cinderella lived not in a French château but on the Argentine Pampas, her carriage pulled by armadillos? What if Sleeping Beauty dreamed away her hundred years in the mountain strongholds of Afghanistan, Snow White fled across the tundra of Greenland, and Goldilocks crept into a cedar-wood refuge high in Moroccos Atlas Mountains?

Raised on such alternative story-tellings, Tahir Shah learned early that the tales we imagine as our own were never exclusively ours.

In a childhood presided over by his father – the celebrated writer Idries Shah, author of the landmark anthology World Tales – Cinderella was as likely to be Algonquin as European, her glass slipper a moccasin.

Fairy Tales Retold is a hymn to that inheritance, one of purest imagination. Gathered here are the worlds best-loved stories, each one transferred to a culture in which it has long flourished: a Congolese Jack & the Beanstalk, an Ethiopian Frog Prince, an Indian Rapunzel, a Japanese Magic Porridge Pot, a Syrian Emperors New Clothes, a Turkish Beauty & the Beast, a Peruvian Puss in Boots, and many more.

Framed by meetings drawn from decades of Shahs own wanderings – a horseless gaucho stumbling through a train carriage, storytellers encountered in caravanserais and mountain villages – each tale arrives as if recounted aloud, the way such stories have always crossed continents, passed on the wind.

These tales, Tahir Shah reminds us, are a communal legacy of humankind, belonging to all people and to all times. No single culture owns them, just as no one culture owns fire, the wheel, or wisdom accumulated through time.

Fairy Tales Retold is a collection of homecomings – familiar stories returned to the wider world, and from all points of the compass.