The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joukhadar
The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joukhadar
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The Thirty Names of Night

Author: Zeyn Joukhadar

Narrator: Samy Figaredo, Lameece Issaq

Unabridged: 9 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/24/2020


Synopsis

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle
Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost

​​From the award-winning author of The Map of Salt and Stars, a new novel about three generations of Syrian Americans haunted by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts—a “vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Often tender, always engrossing, The Thirty Names of Night is a feat” (R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries).

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria, but he’s been struggling ever since his mother’s ghost began visiting him each evening.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature “folkloric, lyrical, and emotionally intense...gorgeous and alive” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a “stunning…vivid, visceral, and urgent” (Booklist, starred review) exploration of loss, memory, migration, and identity.

About Zeyn Joukhadar

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Map of Salt and Stars and The Thirty Names of Night. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and of American Mensa. Joukhadar’s writing has appeared in Salon, The Paris ReviewThe Kenyon Review, and elsewhere and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the NetThe Map of Salt and Stars was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. He has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?” …My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, and all its names.”---------------------------------------…not all migrations end with a retur......more

I wanted to read this book because I loved the beautiful writing in The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar. This novel is also beautifully written. It’s also structured around two time frames and it is about Syrian immigrants. But there is much more here in addition to the Syrian immigrant expe......more

What a remarkable, stunning, memorable, huggable story. I read The Map of Salt and Stars by this author two years ago and could not imagine writing more lyrical and descriptive. I loved every minute with that book, but wow. In The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joukhadar has penned a masterpiece. Where......more

I don’t know how to rate the novel “The Thirty Names of Night”. The writing is beautiful, almost dreamy. The story is a powerful one. Although this is a work of fiction, it opened my eyes to Syrian Americans, and especially to an area of NYC that was once “little Syria”. Oh, and birds! I loved learn......more

A 4-star story with 5-star writing, until the 5-star ending made my eyes sting with tears. Reading this taught me the difference between sadness and sorrow.......more