‘Nino, I have talked to my father. May he be merciful and let me die here, in the same street, in the same house where I was born. OTHER BOOKS. 1. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. More By and About This Author. Ali and Nino Kurban Said, Author Overlook Press $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-87951-668-0. Suddenly the telephone rang. Ali and Nino is a 1937 novel by the pseudonymous author Kurban Said.Set in Baku, Azerbaijan, during the war-torn period of 1914 to 1920, the novel concerns the passionate romance of Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a young Muslim nobleman, and Nino Kipiani, a Christian noblewoman from Georgia. Here, where Eastern and Occidental collide, they are inevitably drawn into the events of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Nino’s voice complained: ‘Ali Khan, I’m dying of heat and mathematics. Come and help me!’ Ten minutes later Nino stretches out her slender arms to me. THE GIRL FROM THE GOLDEN HORN; Buy this book … Me and Nino, a Christian, who eats with knife and fork, has laughing eyes and wears filmy silk stockings' [p. 19]. Ali and Nino, two lovers from vastly different backgrounds, grow up together in carefree innocence in Baku on the Caspian Sea. He agrees.’ Nino trembles and laughs. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war. Her delicate fingers are inkstained, and I kiss these stains. Early in the novel, as Ali reflects on his hometown, he thinks, 'God let me be born here, a Muslim of the Shiite faith, in the religion of Imam Dshafar.