The Wrath & the Dawn

The Wrath & the Dawn is a young adult novel by Renée Ahdieh, published in 2015 and a reimagining of the Arabian Nights.

Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, marries a new bride every night and has her killed at dawn, which has made him hated and feared throughout the land. Shahrzad is sixteen, and she volunteers to marry him, which astonishes everyone who does not know that she intends to survive long enough to avenge the death of her best friend, among others. Her wit keeps her alive past the first dawn, and then past many more, because she is clever enough to give the Caliph a reason to want her alive until the next night. She also discovers that she is falling in love with the boy who killed someone she loved, and that the murderous king is not what either his enemies or his subjects believe. The story is set in a court of gardens, poets and assassins, and it is as much about a young woman learning to be dangerous as it is about the marriage.

Ahdieh writes the novel as a love story inside a revenge plot, and the question of who is actually responsible for the deaths runs through both.