A child is born into the successful but despised community known as the Sepharad, the Jews of Iberia. He is a premature runt, his mother struck barren by his birth, divorced, cast out to live the life of a virtual slave in her parents’ home. The boy is not expected to live and no effort is made for him. But he does live. His flinty great-grandmother, a woman who knows how precarious the life of a Jew in Al Andalus can be, takes him in, raises him and secretly educates him. He will become a man of secrets – of ethnicity, of religion, of sexuality, a chameleon who can pass as male or female, adult or child, Muslim, Jew or Christian. 

Follow Jaco ibn Ishaq on his journey from seclusion to the bandit-ridden mountains of the interior, to the souks of Granada, to the splendid, treacherous court of the Alhambra, to the heat of a battle for a mountain fortress and to the heart of the new Spanish Inquisition.  A journey to become – the Mongoose.