Mary Helen Stefaniak

Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. A well-traveled young woman, Miss Grace Spivey believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of One Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad Bazaar.

Miss Spivey transforms the lives of everyone around her: Gladys’s older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), her pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs’ African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.

From the fate of a camel driver on the Arabian Peninsula to that of a circus in the wake of Sherman’s army, from the role of an enchanted pitcher in a ninth-century war between brothers to its recreation in a segregated classroom in the 1930s, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from the coastal islands of Georgia to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling.