A Bookshop Editor's Pick * A Goodreads Editors' Pick
New York Post, A Best New Book
Named a Best Book of the Summer by Time, Elle, & Vulture
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Seattle Times, Vulture, Marie Claire, Ms., Bookshop, Literary Hub, The Millions, & Electric Literature
"[A] smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrator’s grandmother’s garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfather’s birthplace of Bisan—'now a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no Palestinians'—Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way, like the narrator’s existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novel’s power is not in cohesion, but in chaos." —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] sharp and disarming debut novel . . . Zaher is expert at crisp turns of phrase that reveal how brittle her narrator is . . . A sturdy novel about an unsteady person is no small feat, and Zaher’s prose is remarkably controlled." —Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
"Birkin-bag economics meets colorism and racism and feminism and more—it’s beyond intersectionality—in Zaher’s stunning and surreal debut novel of a young Palestinian woman who lives and teaches in New York City." —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
"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
"The Coin feels like a distinctly Palestinian novel—concerning itself, as it does, with its narrator’s statelessness and increasing sense of isolation . . . Zaher’s book also does the vital work of reminding the reader that there is no single story to be told about any group of people in any part of the world. Zaher’s protagonist struggles under the weight of immense trauma, yes, but she’s also a fashionista, an obsessor, and an educator doing her (sometimes-flawed) best to impart wisdom. In other words, she’s a human being full of complexities and contradictions, and spending time in her world is both dizzying and delightful." —Emma Specter, Vogue
"With themes of embodiment, class, gender, loneliness and more, this is a striking debut. Read it, and then go back to read it again." —Karla J. Strand, Ms.
"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
"Stories about women spiraling out in New York aren’t exactly hard to come by, but with The Coin, Zaher fashions a narrative in this vein that’s undeniably fresh." —Chloe Joe, Bustle
"Fashion effortlessly converges with politics in Yasmin’s prose . . . Witty writing throughout The Coin is imbued with warped ethics, dark humour and social commentary . . . Yasmin daringly stretches the story to these extremes, making for a truly relishable read." —Hafsa Lodi, MOJEH
"[A] completely captivating debut. This is one of those books that was recommended to me by so many different people from writers to booksellers for months. Once I finally got my hands on it, it wasn’t a question of whether or not it was good. It was a question of how brilliant it was. I devoured this. It will easily be a book of the year and talked about for years to come." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"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
"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
★ 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.
