The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years
A Novel
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- $85.00
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- $85.00
Descripción editorial
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE
AN INDIE NEXT PICK
A LIBRARY READS PICK
"Rich and swoony...an ambitious delight, with rich characters and some exceptionally lovely writing...This is the start of a major career." -- The New York Times Book Review
“A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous
Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.
Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
South African novelist Khan blends gothic tropes with Indian mythology in her poignant U.S. debut. Sana, a 15-year-old Indian girl whose mother died of cancer several years earlier, lives with her father in an apartment in a run-down mansion in the South African coastal town of Durban. Sana copes with her grief by diving into the story of the house's original owner, which Khan expands in a parallel narrative tracing Akbar Ali Khan's 1919 departure from Bombay to build the mansion and fill it with his family and exotic pets. Akbar eventually becomes dissatisfied with his marriage and takes a second wife, Meena. As Sana becomes invested in the Akbars' love story and tries to discover their fate, she uncovers long-buried secrets about the family. Khan also devotes chapters to a djinn, who has a room to itself in the house and remembers a "dead woman" who once lived there. Despite the disparate elements, the novel coheres as Khan portrays the house's point of view, showing in playful and evocative prose how it responds to new residents ("As the new smells climb excitedly into the eaves... older smells, annoyed, move higher up away"). This holds its own in a crowded field of neo-gothic fiction.
