The Coin: A Novel

by Yasmin Zaher

• Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the Swansea Dylan Thomas Prize
• A New York Times Notable Book
• A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
• A Bookshop & Goodreads Editors' Pick
• Time [A Must-Read Book of the Year]

Named a Best Book:

• Amazon
• The New Yorker
• People
• Time
• GQ
• Vulture
• New York Post
• Elle
• The National
• Flair Magazine
• Dazed
• Electric Literature
• Debutiful
• Publishers Weekly
• Library Journal

Named a Most Anticipated Book:

• The Seattle Times
• Vulture
• Marie Claire
• Ms.
• Bookshop
• Literary Hub
• The Millions
• Electric Literature
  

About the Book:

A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind

The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.

In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.

But America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

Praise for The Coin

"[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

"Glamorous and unhinged . . . Zaher upends the expectations and cultural parameters of American literature . . . The Coin remains singular in its achievement: it transcends the crazy girl/sad girl trope common in Ottessa Moshfegh–influenced novels with an ending that feels philosophically complex, multilayered, and as humorous as it is heartbreaking . . . A psychoanalytic wonder, a prismatic and pithy gem of a book, which is both light and dark, exilic and utterly at home in the tradition its narrator denounces."
—Aria Aber, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Zaher’s novel is unflinching . . . I became so engrossed in the momentum of the narrator’s telling that I could hardly put the book down without feeling that I should give myself over to it . . . If, as the narrator says, 'money simplifies everything,' then language only complicates, and for the better. Zaher’s novel deeply unsettled me, as only language can."
—Ben Lewellyn-Taylor, Colorado 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