Reader Score
82%
82% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 10 reviews on
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.
"What I most admire about Zeyn Joukhadar’s writing is his ability to ground the fantastical. The Thirty Names of Night contains some of the most beautiful images I can remember ever reading in a book, unreal yet impeccably concrete."
PhD Int'l Human Rights Law. Award-winning author. Out now: BLACKWATER FALLS. Rep: Danielle Burby @ MWLA. @azkhanbooks Insta & Hive @azkhanbooks@mastodon.world
@ostadjaan @ShabanaMir1 @kecia_ali @GWillowWilson @waraqamusa Zeyn Joukhadar's Syrian YA, The Map of Salt and Stars, is too beautiful for words. Poetic, haunting, heartbreaking. His new book is The Thirty Names of Night.