In acknowledgement of the surprise that this swashbuckling, Boy's Own, Jewish picaresque swords-elephants-and-treachery adventure, set in the 10th-century Caucasus, might hold for his readers, Michael Chabon appends an explanatory “Afterword”.

He explains that his departure from “late-century naturalism” to produce a book that he will always think of as “Jews with Swords” arose from a longing for “ a little adventure”, while delving into the realm of Jewishness.

Chabon's previous novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, marked the beginning of an exploration of Jewishness and Diaspora. Now Gentlemen of the Road can be seen as reclaiming Jewishness for fiction. His engagement with the subject is taking the form of a colourful, imaginative inventiveness. Thus, he inserted a whisper of the Holocaust into a Sherlock Holmes story, and in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, manufactured a counterfactual history of the aftermath of the Second World War and the 1947 Israel-Arab War. Now he has conflated the Thousand and One Nights, The Three Musketeers, a raft of historical adventure tales and the wanderings of the Israelites in a way that touches teasingly and gently on allegory.

The odd couple at the centre of the book are Amram and Zelikman, the former a giant Abyssinian Jew who carries a deadly axe named “Defiler of your Mother”, the latter, a pale, cadaverous, shaggy blond Frank from Regensburg, in flight from his Jewishness, whose weapon, named Lancet, is a long needle with which he skewers assailants.

Stylish swindlers, who trick people out of their money, they have to deliver home a beautiful young man, Filaq, whose “father's fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea” has been usurped by Buljan and his brother Alp, with the heir sold into slavery.

Extraordinary adventures unfold; there's bloodshed, violence, pillage and plunder, elephants play a crucial role and nothing is what it seems. Every page holds a twist, while the prose is rich, but perfect in its control and its calibration between the poetic and the exotic. Its use of words such as “shatranj”, “rebab”, “sharab” and “javshigar” springs naturally from the setting, a time of mingling of races and cultures.

The book has a melancholy heart while its allegorical echoes are at once hard-nosed, wishful and fantastic (and all the more powerful for that).

With its allusive glances here at Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, there at Don Quixote, its soaring storytelling and subtle resonances with contemporary history, readers might feel that they have reached the book equivalent of the Promised Land.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Sceptre, £12; 224pp

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide