Prepare yourself for a wild ride on what the 11th-century Kashmiri storyteller Somadeva called “the ocean of the streams of story”. Wild because the tellers of fairytales that Nicholas Jubber writes about are all remarkable individuals and because he narrates at a brisk, occasionally hectic pace; punctuation with the silky-voiced Esther Wane’s tellings of actual tales is a nice contrast.
Jubber has form in the history of storytelling. His 2019 book Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe ranges from The Odyssey to the Icelandic sagas. His ebullient enthusiasm and shrewd analysis of story structure introduce the listener to the ogres, vampires and demons of Somadeva and much more. For a start there’s the 17th-century Neapolitan Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone, the source
