Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award, Barbara Gittings Literature Prize
Chosen Best Book of the Year by Bustle
Selected as 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 marked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they hold deep within. A vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Tender often, always engrossing, The Thirty Names of Night is an exceptional work.
Five years after a suspicious fire took the life of his mother, an ornithologist, a Syrian American trans boy who lives his identity in silence abandons the name he was born with and sets out to find a new one. As the sole caretaker of his grandmother, he spends his days confined to his apartment, avoiding the neighborhood mosque, his estranged sister, and even his best friend, who is also his lifelong love. He only feels truly free when he goes out at night to paint murals on buildings in the old New York neighborhood of Little Syria, although since his mother’s ghost began visiting him each evening, he has not found peace.
One night he enters the abandoned community center and finds the worn notebook of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her life to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years ago, but her diary contains evidence that both she and the protagonist’s mother encountered the same rare bird before they died. The connection between Laila Z’s past and the mother is far more intimate than he ever imagined. Even more revealing is discovering, through her story, the paths of queer and trans people within his own community that had until then been invisible to him. Realizing he has never been alone, he gathers the courage to claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic word meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds begin to gather inexplicably in the skies over New York, Nadir asks his family and friends for help to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the bird his mother tried to save. Following the trail of the maternal ghost, he brings to light the silences kept in the name of survival by his community, his family, and himself, and discovers the family that was always there.
With Zeyn Joukhadar’s characteristic style, folkloric, lyrical, and of dazzling emotional intensity, The Thirty Names of Night is a powerful exploration of loss, memory, migration, and identity.
