Marco Polo

A seventeen-year-old meets his absentee father and immediately gets dragged across the world's most dangerous trade route.

Marco Polo didn't ask to spend his teenage years crossing deserts, dodging bandits, and learning Mongol court politics. His merchant father showed up after a fifteen-year absence, handed him travel gear, and said they were walking to China. No choice, no preparation. Just go.

What happened next became the most influential travelogue in history - and one of the most doubted.

• A Venetian teenager becomes a trusted advisor to Kublai Khan, the most powerful man on earth
• Seventeen years embedded in the Mongol Empire while Europe still thought Asia was filled with dog-headed men and gold-digging ants
• A controversial book that inspired Columbus, enraged scholars, and blurred the line between observation and embellishment
• The brutal truth: Marco probably never saw his mother's grave before leaving, and didn't return home until he was middle-aged
• Why historians still fight over whether he made the whole thing up

This is the story of an abandoned kid who accidentally documented a world his countrymen couldn't imagine existed.

Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.