Praise for Brother Alive:
**A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree**
**Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award**
**Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award**
**Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize**
Shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize
Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award
A New York Times Writer to Watch This Summer
Named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and Library Journal
Named a Lit 16 Debut Book
“Beguiling . . . A nervy, episodic read . . . Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods bear close examination . . . [His] sentences abound with florid, poetic metaphors while maintaining the clipped, declarative tempo of Scripture . . . Brother Alive is Rushdie with none of the ceremony, a searing collage of the profound and the mundane.”—Pete Tosiello, New York Times Book Review
“This debut is essential reading for anyone who loves great writing. Zain Khalid is a supremely talented writer and his skills with words dazzle on every page of this book . . . A novel about family, belonging, sexuality, and the insidious influence of capitalism on daily life, Brother Alive reminded me just how powerful a great novel can be. As I finished it I found myself looking at the world in a more expansive way, and that’s something I’m immensely grateful for.”—David Vogel, BuzzFeed
“A stunningly ambitious and complex debut . . . Most profound is Khalid’s deep exploration of grief . . . An engrossing read, a propulsive narrative with lyrical prose that will stay with you long after the last page.”—Sadiya Ansari, Toronto Star
“Brother Alive feels like the first work of fiction since the beginning of the pandemic that reflects the mood of the city . . . This book, so focused on the past, sometimes seems to have little optimism for the future. But some of Khalid’s best writing comes when he has Youssef wax eloquent about whatever’s on the horizon. Even though Brother Alive is far from hopeful, wrestling with intellectual and political energies that seem to have no appropriate outlet, Youssef, and his author, maintain a sense of delirious wonder throughout. It’s a very New York quality: Every so often, the cynicism falls away and the sentiment—the affection that keeps us in this worn-out city—shines through.”—Jonah Bromwich, Atlantic
“Takes the reader from Staten Island to Saudi Arabia on a journey into a unique madness . . . Khalid’s writing is lyrical, with the precise vocabulary of a poetry and a surveyor’s eye for details, yet Brother Alive never gets lost in its erudition—the prose is delightful and clear . . . Ultimately a work of profound sadness as much as political savvy, Brother Alive is a stunning debut.”—Brian Watson, Rain Taxi
“A smooth interleaving of science-fiction with high-resolution realism and hallucinatory phantasmagoria . . . One of those books that appear only seldomly and bellow, from the first page, from the first line, that they require, beyond the valence-judgements expected of a review, earnest, laborious exploration.”—Jonah Howell, Cleveland Review of Books
“One the most exciting debuts in recent years . . . Khalid’s vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it’s also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness. It’s a love story—many times over, actually—wrapped inside a searing indictment, a rage against the many machines that would sacrifice people at the altar of capital. That Khalid executes a novel this intricate, elegant, and compassionate with such masterly prose all but guarantees that this will be one of the finest works of literature this year. Blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory.”—Luke Gorham, Library Journal (starred review)
“In this auspicious debut, Khalid unfurls a beguiling story involving a Staten Island imam’s secrets . . . Khalid brilliantly reveals new shades of truth from each character’s point of view, and perfectly integrates the many ideas about capitalism and religious extremism into an enthralling narrative. It’s a tour de force.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Brother Alive is a rigorously intelligent, wholly sensitive, and quietly rebellious work of art, with prose as profound as it is beautiful. What an inspiring examination of the waywardness of life and the grounding of love this story is. What a wise, thoughtful writer Zain Khalid is. What a gift to humanity this book is.”—Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times-bestselling author of The Prophets
“A novel with the polish and warmth of a stone smoothed in the hand after a lifetime of loving worry—original, darkly witty, sometimes bitter, and so very wise. And certainly the debut of a major new writer.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Zain Khalid’s imagination and talent are a marvel to behold in these pages. Brother Alive bristles with a kinetic, hypnotic energy that also manages to ask profound questions about love, faith, family, and loyalty. Hallucinatory and electrifying, Brother Alive announces the arrival of a writer with an impassioned and fearless vision.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
“This genre-defying novel, and the intelligence, originality, and awareness of the mind that produced it, astonished me. I was reminded of Günter Grass, of Viet Thanh Nguyen. Through the consciousness of an unforgettable narrator, Youssef, Khalid begins by subtly illuminating the contours of a globalized world in which the personal is geopolitical; he ends by turning up the light and refusing to let us look away.”—Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao
“Brother Alive is a remarkable work. Zain Khalid creates an immersive world rich in compelling detail. But even more impressively, Khalid achieves a kind of resistance text against our endemic inhumanity. The thrill lies in witnessing such a cogent and powerful intellect tune in to the music of life. An inspiring reminder of the great capacity of novels.”—Sergio de la Pava, author of A Naked Singularity
“Brother Alive is a hallucinatory revelation. With beautifully-written prose, characters that truly leap from the pages, and a rendering of love, both familial and romantic, that made my heart ache, Zain Khalid has announced himself as a writer the world needs to sit up and pay attention to. An exquisitely told, breathtaking, revolutionary book, I barely blinked while reading it and was bereft when I finished it.”—Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions
★ 07/01/2022
DEBUT Khalid's truly genre-defying work, one the most exciting debuts in recent years, tells the story of three adopted brothers—Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef—raised by an imam in Staten Island. As the trio reaches adulthood, lifelong mysteries begin to unravel, and the brothers are forced to follow their adoptive father to a futuristic city being built by radicals in Saudi Arabia. As intelligent as it is imaginative, the novel attacks various systems of control—religion, yes, but more explicitly capitalism—that would strip people of their very humanity. Here are the impossibly blurred lines between the personal and the global, East and West, godly and godless; it's where man's soul is said to be an invoice, and geopolitics infects all. Khalid's vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it's also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness. It's a love story—many times over, actually—wrapped inside a searing indictment, a rage against the many machines that would sacrifice people at the altar of capital. That Khalid executes a novel this intricate, elegant, and compassionate with such masterly prose all but guarantees that this will be one of the finest works of literature this year. VERDICT Blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory.—Luke Gorham
2022-04-27
A Staten Island mosque becomes the unlikely center of an outsize conflict around faith and family.
Khalid’s bulky, ambitious debut novel is largely narrated by Youssef, one of three unrelated children adopted by Salim, an imam who spirited them out of Saudi Arabia under mysterious circumstances. Much of the story is concerned with exploring that mystery, braided around a plot about fractures within the Muslim faith. Along with his adopted brothers, Dayo and Iseul, Youssef snoops around the mosque and learns about the complex reasons for their departure and how it relates to Salim’s closeted homosexuality. Adding a dash of surreality to an already disorienting situation is Brother, a shape-shifting double who shadows Youssef, serving as a kind of animal familiar and manifestation of his mood. (At various points, Brother is a capuchin monkey, a cat, a bat, a hen, a cocker spaniel, and more.) In time, Youssef realizes he’s enmeshed in a bigger conflagration between Salim and a rival imam in Saudi Arabia who strives to pharmaceutically convert nonbelievers and leads a techno-futuristic compound in the country that’s as corrupt as it is glittering. (It’s modeled after an actual project, Neom, a planned “smart city” under construction.) Khalid has plenty to say about art, relationships, religion, and family, and he gives Youssef an appealingly wry and questioning voice. But the novel creaks from its overabundance of ambition—wanting to be a domestic novel, satire of faith, critique of petrocapitalism, myth-soaked allegory, and (in its latter stages) techno-thriller, it’s constantly in search of a center. Whatever power Brother might have as a symbol for hidden lives and alternate existences is sapped by the busy plotting. Khalid has an admirably encyclopedist instinct, but he’s set an almost impossibly high bar for storytelling.
A big-picture saga about faith that gets lost in the details.