Noah Gordon

American novelist best known for The Physician, a sweeping historical novel about an eleventh-century English boy who travels to Persia to study medicine.

Noah Gordon is an American novelist whose historical epics have won enormous readerships in Europe, particularly in Germany and Spain, even as he has remained less celebrated in his native United States. His most famous work, The Physician, published in 1986, is one of the great unsung historical novels of the twentieth century — a richly researched, compulsively readable account of a young English orphan in the eleventh century who discovers a gift for healing and travels across the medieval world to study with the great physician Ibn Sina in Persia.

The Physician exemplifies Gordon’s particular strengths: meticulous historical research worn lightly, a protagonist whose journey serves as a lens through which readers experience an entire era, and the ability to make the remote past feel vivid and immediate. The novel follows Rob Jeremy Cole from his origins as a barber-surgeon’s apprentice in England through the Islamic world, where he disguises himself as a Jew to gain admission to Ibn Sina’s school — a dangerous deception in a society where conversion was punishable by death.

Gordon continued Rob Cole’s story in Shaman (set in nineteenth-century America) and The Last Jew. He also wrote The Rabbi, The Jerusalem Diamond, and other novels. In Germany, Gordon’s books have sold millions of copies and he has received some of that country’s highest literary honors. For readers of historical fiction who want sweeping narratives grounded in genuine research, The Physician is a revelatory experience.