The Coin
A Novel
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3.6 • 22 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
Shortlisted for the Swansea Dylan Thomas Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
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.
"[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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This blistering debut novel about a Palestinian woman unraveling in New York lodged itself in our memory. Nominally rich, but with no access to her huge inheritance due to the terms of her father’s will, the unnamed young narrator lives on an allowance from her brother, wears head-to-toe high fashion that she can’t afford, and teaches Black and immigrant middle school children with no real regard for the curriculum. This novel feels frantic from the very first page, and it only gathers speed as the narrator gets caught up in a pyramid scheme, which builds to a seriously intense conclusion. In her captivating first novel, Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher plays with reality to the point that we’re never quite sure how reliable our protagonist’s grip on it is. This is an absolutely fascinating rumination on morality, opulence, statelessness, and sexuality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Zaher's hypnotic debut, an obsessive Palestinian woman flees her oppressive homeland for Manhattan and employs increasingly unorthodox methods to teach English at the private school where she works. The unnamed narrator lives comfortably on an allowance from the estate of her parents, who died years earlier in a car accident. She fills her free time with elaborate ablutions and stays up late cleaning and organizing her apartment, to the point that she's so exhausted during class she can't stay on her feet. Disregarding the standard curriculum in favor of harsh life lessons (love is akin to being "taken hostage"), she gives her students bizarre assignments such as extracting confessions from their family members. She chalks up her strange behavior to a coin she remembers swallowing as a child, which she imagines remains lodged in her back. 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 ("I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke. And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody"). It's a tour de force.
Customer Reviews
A book that went nowhere
except a decent into madness. Beware, it will try to drag you down too. Take a hard pass and save your money and time. This book is proof anyone can write a bestseller! Would love to have the time I spent reading this back. Mercifully it was very short. That’s the only good thing I can say. Sorry for being so uncharacteristically negative.