You'll love the talking eggplant! Take a quirky, fun, medieval trip with a gorgeous alchemist, teenage prodigy and a tiny, wisecracking, 600-year-old eggplant. In this award-winning novel, you'll travel through strange but real medieval events with a heroic trio on a quest that's both weird and wonderful. And that's not all: Roll across continents on horses, ships and camels with a well-versed, naive and love-struck teenager. —March across medieval Europe with an army of misfits led by a boy prophet. —Train with stoned and unlikely killers who terrorize Middle East rulers. —Peek inside Hassan i Sabbah's ancient library of mystical and profane literature. —Touch the petrified body of the world's first man, Adam. —Get juicy gossip from a fresh, fast-talking, funny vegetable. Orphans, Assassins and the Existential Eggplant shimmies through the early 13th century with a female alchemist, teenage prodigy and the one-and-only ancient, shrunken and truly heroic eggplant that can speak to whomever wears it. In search of the fabled Lost Stone of Eden, they cross Europe and the Mediterranean with the Children's Crusade, hijack a caravan in the Sahara desert, live with hashish-fueled Assassins in the mountains of Persia and rediscover paradise on the island of Bahrain. Orphans, Assassins and the Existential Eggplant won the Silver Medal Winner for Historic Fiction in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards, 2015.