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 a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her – her wilfulness, 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 civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging – all while resisting easy moralising. Provocative, wry and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
‘Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin does much more than meet the highest standards of literature: it sets its own standards…The Coin is not a wonderful beginning that promises masterpieces to come – it already is a masterpiece’ – Slavoj Zizek
‘The Coin is a filthy, elegant book, keen on the fixations that overtake the body and upend a life’ – Raven Leilani, author of Luster
‘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 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
‘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
‘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
‘Yasmin Zaher must have used electric ink to write this book. It is charged with such strangeness and humor; it glows with disobedience. A marvelous novel’ – Aysegül Savas, author of White on White and Walking on the Ceiling
‘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
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian writer and journalist. She got her B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering at Yale University and an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, where she was advised by Katie Kitamura. She lives in Paris.
