Description
Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
Shortlisted for the Swansea Dylan Thomas Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian womans unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind
The Coins narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling herher willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belongingall while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
[A] smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrators grandmothers garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfathers birthplace of Bisannow a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no PalestiniansStokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way, like the narrators existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novels power is not in cohesion, but in chaos. Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review
Author: Yasmin Zaher
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 07/09/2024
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.61h x 5.85w x 0.84d
ISBN: 9781646222100
Language: English
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