The Merchant and the Jinni : A Tale from the 1001 Nights by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

A merchant tosses aside a date pit beneath a tree and unknowingly kills a jinni's invisible son. Sentenced to die on the spot, he asks for one year to set his affairs in order and returns, exactly as promised, to face his death.

What he doesn't expect is that three strangers, each leading an animal that used to be a person, will choose to stay and tell the jinni their own extraordinary stories — and that a stranger's willingness to sit with a condemned man might be the only thing standing between him and the sentence he agreed to.

A tale from The Thousand and One Nights, retold plainly — for readers seven to ninety, about an accident, a promise kept, and the debts strangers choose to pay for each other.