Cybil

Zeyn Joukhadar’s follow-up to his The Map of Salt and Stars, which was a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction and won the 2018 Middle East Book Award in Youth Literature, is a multigenerational novel about Syrian immigrants in New York City. Its protagonist, Nadir, a young trans man grieving the violent death of his mother and struggling to find his identity, discovers a journal left behind by Laila Z, a mysterious Syrian bird artist who disappeared decades before, in a soon-to-be-demolished building in Little Syria. By switching between the journal and chapters narrated by Nadir, Joukhadar tells a story of […]