He studied under the greatest mind of his age - and refused to stop asking questions.

You know the feeling of a question that will not let go. The one that comes back at three in the morning, or surfaces in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, or sits at the edge of your mind like something you forgot to say. The question you are not quite sure you are allowed to ask.

Bahmanyār ibn al-Marzubān spent his life honoring that feeling. In eleventh-century Persia, this Zoroastrian scholar from the mountains of Azerbaijan traveled to the great city of Ray, sat at the back of Avicenna's study circle, and became something rarer than a brilliant student. He became the person whose questions made his teacher's thinking sharper, clearer, and more honest than it had been before. Over twenty years of debates, letters, and long evenings in Ray and Isfahan, the two of them produced one of the most remarkable intellectual exchanges in the history of ideas. And when Avicenna died, Bahmanyār kept working alone for twenty-nine more years, carrying the fire forward, asking the questions the tradition still needed someone to ask.

This is his story, told as narrative history: the researched facts of a real life, and the rooms between them brought back to life.

• Find yourself in the person who inherits a tradition and takes it seriously enough to disagree with it
• Understand the idea Bahmanyār pioneered, that some things are more fully real than others, and why it still echoes in Islamic philosophy
• Sit inside one of history's great teacher-and-student relationships, told with the warmth and intimacy it deserves
• Discover what it takes to keep a flame alive after the person who lit it is gone
• Come away with a different relationship to your own unanswered questions

This is a book for anyone who has ever loved learning, lost a teacher, or carried a question further than they meant to.

Open the first page. The fire is still burning.