Time, A Best Book of the Summer
Vulture, A Best Book of the Summer
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Seattle Times, Vulture, Marie Claire, Ms., Bookshop, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature
"A hypnotic portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown." —Shannon Carlin, Time
"The Coin, the Palestinian journalist Zaher’s debut—which is, yes, about a woman unraveling in New York City—feels arrestingly new . . . Her narration is spiky and honest, her choices gleefully, consciously bad. The pleasure she takes in making those decisions and then recounting them is what makes The Coin both unusual and compelling. Our protagonist denies herself nothing she wants, and she denies her audience no detail. The combination renders the book tough to put down." —Lily Meyer, The Atlantic
"[An] unusual, powerful novel . . . Zaher captures the suffocating pain of isolation and loneliness in a manner that feels chillingly universal." —Connie Ogle, The Star Tribune
"In her debut novel, Zaher draws a Venn diagram of the glamorously neurotic and the politically oppressed, then sets her protagonist spinning in that maddening little overlap." —Madeline Leung Coleman, Vulture
"The Woman Unravelling is one of my favorite micro-genres, and The Coin is an ugly and beautiful addition . . . I’m reminded very much of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with tones of After Leaving Mr. McKenzie and After Claude, books that detail the loneliness and narcissism of mental illness, but also the structural reasons (misogyny, for starters) why such angst is the only reasonable response." —Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review
"A very stylish novel that manages to broach class and statelessness with tact and humor, while also touching on beauty, sex, love and the nature of civilization itself, all from a Palestinian debut novelist." —Literary Hub
"The exquisite novel probes the space between the tragedy of statelessness and the neurotic glow of affluence, proving that in this overlap lies a rich and bewildering landscape of human behavior. Strange and luminous, it weaves an elegant tapestry from disparate threads, touching on class, fashion, lust, grief, and violence with wit and poise. Funny, unnerving, and decadent, The Coin is at once an intimate character study and a startling portrait of contemporary America." —Bella Moses, Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"Wondrous . . . Capitalism, materialism, love, lust, friendship, purity, the natural world, cleanliness, place, and self-image are all explored in this thunderous, lightning-speed, fast-reading tale. Zaher, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian, writes with passion and holds nothing back in her buzzy, strong debut." —Library Journal (starred review)
"When past and present, self-indulgence and self-loathing collide, the result is a bold and terrifying reinvention . . . Brilliant." —Booklist (starred review)
"[A] hypnotic debut . . . Zaher’s writing is deeply arresting, especially when her narrator is energized by her newfound sense of self-possession in New York, where she walks the streets wearing a 'violent' and 'sexual' perfume and carries a Birkin bag, which thrillingly transforms her into an object of desire . . . A tour de force." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An absorbing fiction debut with a disquieting tale about race, class, morality, and artifice . . . A perilous journey, rendered in sensuous prose." —Kirkus Reviews
“The Coin is a filthy, elegant book, keen on the fixations that overtake the body and upend a life.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster
"The Coin is a brilliant, audacious, powerhouse of a novel. A story of obsession and appetite, politics and class, it is deliciously unruly. An exceptional debut by an outrageous new talent." —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies and A Separation
"I loved this bonkers novel. I was hooked by the voice, and mesmerized by the glamorous and sordid hijinks. I have never read such a strange and recognizable representation of post-2016 New York City, its luxury and squalor. Zaher is a writer to watch." —Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot
"Yasmin Zaher must have used electric ink to write this book. It is charged with such strangeness and humor; it glows with disobedience. A marvelous novel." —Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White and Walking on the Ceiling
"The Coin is a taut, caustic wonder. Like Jean Rhys, Yasmin Zaher captures the outrageous loneliness of contemporary life, the gradual and total displacement of the human heart. This is a novel of wealth, filth, beauty, and grief told in clarion prose and with unbearable suspense. I was in its clutches from the first page." —Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story and Temporary
"The Coin is marvellous, absolutely mental, and full of pleasurable surprises. I read it in a flash. What an entrance." —Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost and The Parisian
"The Coin does much more than meet the highest standards of literature: it sets its own standards. It combines intimate bodily observations and repetitive daily routines with delicate power plays, displays of crumbling authority, and interrogations of justice, all against the background of global violence. And should we really be surprised that it was a young Palestinian citizen of Israel who performed this miracle? Those who dismiss Palestinians as the violent Other of the Western civilization will discover that a Palestinian can see the truth of our messy world better than we ourselves. The Coin is not a wonderful beginning that promises masterpieces to come—it already is a masterpiece.” —Slavoj Žižek
★ 06/01/2024
DEBUT An unnamed young, rich, beautiful, meticulously fashionable Palestinian immigrant is the narrator of Zaher's wondrous first novel. The protagonist teaches, with unconventional methods, at a middle school for underprivileged boys in Brooklyn, New York, all while she tries to put down roots in the United States. The narrator, who is devoted to and proud of her Hermès Birkin bag, soon befriends a well-dressed homeless man and joins with him in a scheme to buy the super-expensive and highly exclusive handbags and resell them to the kinds of people whom the Hermès store personnel would never allow to buy a Birkin directly. As the novel unfolds, luxury goods and clothing seem to take a toll on the narrator, however, and she ends up stripping down to her skin and turning her apartment into a nature preserve. VERDICT Capitalism, materialism, love, lust, friendship, purity, the natural world, cleanliness, place, and self-image are all explored in this thunderous, lightning-speed, fast-reading tale. Zaher, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian, writes with passion and holds nothing back in her buzzy, strong debut.—Lisa Rohrbaugh
2024-05-04
A woman in search of herself.
Palestinian journalist Zaher makes an absorbing fiction debut with a disquieting tale about race, class, morality, and artifice. Her narrator is a young Palestinian woman who finds herself in New York, teaching Black and immigrant middle school students. Hugely wealthy, although without access to an inheritance of more than $28 million because of the terms of her father’s will, she lives on a monthly allowance doled out by her brother. As a friend remarks, she is “simultaneously rich and poor.” Intent on looking “consistently chic and expensive,” she wears designer clothing: Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Miu Miu, Chloé, Fendi, and so much more. She is also simultaneously Black and white, a light-skinned Arab with a “deceiving complexion” that masks her true identity: an émigré with a troubled connection to her “biblical homeland” and to a current home she finds alienating. “I was scared of American culture,” she admits. “When I say that, I don’t mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.” Emotionally isolated and culturally estranged, she becomes obsessed with dirt. “I’m a moral woman,” she says, “…all I want is to be clean.” Zaher lavishes much attention on the narrator’s constant scrubbing, bleaching, and abrading; she rubs herself raw. Her compulsion for cleanliness, she realizes, was instilled by the women she recalls growing up, who “placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.” Her own sense of control erodes after she becomes caught up in a pyramid scheme involving the resale of Birkin bags. “Fashion is pretense,” she comes to realize, “education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense.” In search of her “true essence,” she withdraws into self-flagellating solitude that leads to the novel’s shattering conclusion.
A perilous journey, rendered in sensuous prose.