When The Thousand and One Nights were first translated into European languages in the 1700s, they caused a sensation—and none more so than “Aladdin,” the tale of a good-for-nothing layabout who happened on a magic lamp. Always the most popular of the Nights stories, “Aladdin” mystified scholars for 300 years; while they could trace other tales from Arab and Persian folklore, this one seemed to have been charmed out of thin air.

Then a tattered, anonymous manuscript was discovered in the Vatican. It revealed Aladdin’s creator to be Hanna Diab, a young Syrian who had travelled to Paris with a French treasure hunter. Even more amazing, it showed that Hanna had conjured the story from his own extraordinary adventures.

In a captivating narrative of literary deduction, Matthew Teller restores authorship to a master storyteller.