"Ali and Nino" is the story of an Azerbaijani youth who falls in love with a Georgian princess. Essentially, the book is a quest for truth and reconciliation in a world of contradictory beliefs and practices – Islam and Christianity, East and West, age and youth, male and female. Much of the novel is set in Baku's Old City (Ichari Shahar), Azerbaijan, on t
he eve of the Bolshevik Revolution beginning around 1917–1918.
The novel was first published in 1937, in a foreign country (Austria), in a foreign language (German), by someone using the pen name of Kurban Said (Gurban Said, in Azeri). The novel now has been published in more than 30 languages, with nearly 100 editions or reprints.
