Description
Preorder for: November 3, 2020
Enormous in scope and theme, this book is a force.
Weaving past and present into a lyrical world, Joukhadar uses a multi-generational cast to explore what it means to belong to a society, a community, and to oneself. Itโs in this narrowing of belonging that the novel truly soars, literal ghosts and the ghosts of self populating the story of a young trans boy as he sheds the confines of his traditional community-at-large and finds himself in the immigrant, working-class, LGBTQ , artistsโ underground of NYC.
The characters are imperfectly human. They experience everything from grief to joy, their lives full of loss and love, of heartbreak and the comfort of others, of seeing their world anew and of being seen for who they are.
This isnโt a novel about suffering; this is a novel about being in the world.
<3 Miranda
The author of the โvivid and urgentโฆimportant and timelyโ (The New York Times Bookย Review) debutย The Map of Salt and Starsย returns with this remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts.
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his motherโs ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmotherโs sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Zโs past is intimately tied to his motherโsโand his grandmotherโsโin ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Zโs story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isnโt and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaningย rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his motherโs ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.
Featuring Zeyn Joukhadarโs signature โmagical and heart-wrenchingโ (The Christian Science Monitor) storytelling,ย The Thirty Names of Nightย is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.