Shaheen

THE ONE THING HIS MONEY COULD NEVER BUY.

Twelve-year-old Saeed Al Mansoori has never quite fit anywhere - too dreamy for his careful father, too restless for the glass towers of Dubai, at home only in the desert his family left behind. Then, on the golden dunes beyond the city, he finds a saker falcon half-buried in the sand and close to death, and everything changes.

With his Bedouin grandfather's patient hand, Saeed nurses the bird back to life and names him Shaheen - the royal one. Day by day the falcon learns to trust him; flight by flight, he chooses to come back. But Shaheen is no ordinary bird. He is a missing champion worth a fortune, and when the richest falconer in the Gulf discovers he is alive, he wants back what the law says is his.

To keep the friend who chose him, Saeed will have to do the impossible - outwit a billionaire's guards, cross the deadliest desert on earth, and face Shaheen's former owner on the one stage where money cannot fly: the greatest falcon race in the country.

A sweeping, big-hearted adventure of courage, family, and the timeless bond between a boy and a falcon, Shaheen is a story about the truest thing the desert can teach - that you can never own a wild heart. You can only become someone it chooses to fly home to.

"A falcon's greatest flight is always the one it chooses."