Shadow Spinner is a fresh and unique version of the story of the Arabian Nights and the 1001 Tales, but it focuses on the story teller and the people around her rather than simply retelling her stories, as most versions do.

The Sultan's wife has betrayed him with a lover, and so the Sultan has killed the two of them. Unwilling to be alone, but believing that all women are betrayers, the Sultan marries a new girl each day and kills her before morning. No young woman in his kingdom is safe.

Then Shahrazad, the daughter of the Sultan's own vizier, volunteers to be his wife. In the morning, facing death, she asks the Sultan if she can tell her younger sister one last story before she dies. The Sultan agrees, and listens as Shahrazad tells her story to Dunyazad. But as Shahrazad sees the sun rising, she breaks off her story at a particularly exciting spot, promising to finish it the next night if she still lives. The Sultan, entertained and intrigued, grants Shahrazad her life for one more day. And so begins a tense and uncertain pattern - each night Shahrazad tells a story, but there is always the danger that if it does not please the Sultan, death awaits.

After two and a half years, Shahrazad is running out of stories.

So Shadow Spinner begins with Marjan, a cripped orphan storyteller who goes with you Auntie Chava to sell jewelry to the few women who remain in the Sultan's harem. When the children gather around her, she naturally begins to tell them a story, just as she imagines her hero Shahrazad does. One of the listeners is Dunyazad, and when she realizes this is a story she has never heard, Marjan is summoned before Shahrazad and taken into the harem.

Once in the harem, Marjan learns that the Sultan's mother is just as dangerous as the sultan himself, and she wants Shahrazad, and all who help her, to fail and die. When Shahrazad tells Marjan's story to the Sultan, they discover the story is a favorite of the Sultan's from his childhood and he looks forward to hearing the full story again - but Marjan only knows the small bit she has already told Shahrazad! They must find the blind beggar who first told the story to Marjan - but it is death to leave the harem! As they search for a way out of their deathtrap, they each learn the power of stories... when there is truth in the tale.