Nineveh (in present-day northern Iraq), 640 BCE In the great Assyrian capital, among the palaces of King Ashurbanipal, Mannu-ki-Aššur is the court healer who, together with the first diviner and the first exorcist, has the duty of taking care of the sovereign and of those around him. A constant commitment, which Mannu fulfills with pride and prestige. When, however, Bel-ibni, the king’s favorite concubine and the woman he has loved since he was a boy, falls gravely ill, Mannu finds himself for the first time without a solution.
To be able to save her, and with her the heir to the throne she bears, Mannu chooses the forbidden path of black magic. A path that leads him to the London of today, more than 2,600 years apart, in search of a medicine that his world cannot offer.
A Fate-Laden Encounter
From this premise begins The Door of Destinies by Glenn Cooper, a novel that brings two eras into dialogue—following in the footsteps of what the American author has already done successfully—but also two lives, intertwined by destiny. In the present, Mannu meets Kate Mayne, an Assyriology professor and one of the few people (five or six) able to speak his language, now extinct and largely forgotten, especially in its spoken form.
If for Mannu what surrounds him seems incomprehensible and the product of a joke from the gods, for Kate that impossible meeting means observing up close all she has studied for years, a unique opportunity, initially mistaken for a deception (and madness), that conveys how intense the love for a culture and a time that do not belong to us can be.
For her, as the chapters unfold, assisting Mannu in his undertaking means overturning her family’s prejudices (which would have had her graduated in Law or Medicine) and giving a new direction to her life, sometimes sad.
Between History, Conspiracies, and Betrayals
The author of bestsellers such as The Library of the Dead, The Last Conclave and The Map of Destiny (to name a few, all initially published by Nord and later by Tea), Cooper has accustomed readers to weaving historical reconstruction with intrigue and investigation, and in this new work he does not renounce his signature approach.
In Nineveh, indeed, traitors move with everything at stake to seize control of the Kingdom, and their shadows reach as far as London, where Mannu will be forced to defend himself from those who want to eliminate him and, above all, prevent the cure for Bel from being found.
Although the main action unfolds in the present, even after the initial “introductory” chapters Cooper opens windows onto the capital of the Assyrian Empire: a way to understand even more the importance of the London events, the interweavings and the secrets that animate the Royal Palace.
Time passes, the salvation of multiple lives and a love that seems doomed to never come to fruition heighten the tension page after page, amid doubts and twists. And, in the meantime, they reveal to readers a distant and gripping page of History.
In essence, the heart of The Door of Destinies is a paradox. Mannu and Kate race against an outcome that, in theory, is already written and already happened, but that centuries have erased and left unknown to modern scholars. If indeed some clay tablets allow Professor Mayne to know Mannu, fragments of his life and his culture, much else remains dark to her. It is hard not to glimpse in the protagonist’s curiosity and thoughts something of the same author, a Harvard-educated archaeologist (and not by chance, the protagonist of the previous novel, The Keys to the Cosmos, is indeed an archaeologist).
The result of the two key characters’ search is a thriller with historical and fantastical overtones, which alternates suspenseful pages with more romantic ones, aided by some secondary characters, never mere narrative devices but pieces of a more complex plot that unfolds gradually. Taken together, it offers readers a humanity that, although it has evolved and changed, still contains constant elements beyond time and space. Love, the fear of losing someone, loyalty but also the thirst for power…
