It's rich in culture, its complexities, the depth of familial connections and the vast intertwining business of everyday life in the country.

I didn't know what to expect when I started listening. It motivated me to check out Saad Z Hossain's Djinn City. I read an interview with Martha Wells recently, after the release of her latest addition to the Murderbot Diaries. Djinn City is a darkly comedic fantasy adventure, and a stirring follow-up to Hossain's 2015 novel Escape from Baghdad!, which NPR called 'a hilarious and searing indictment of the project we euphemistically call 'nation-building.'' Hossain updates the supernatural creatures of Arabian mythology - a superior but by no means perfect species pushed to the brink by the staggering ineptitude of the human race. Soon, the boys are at the center of a great djinn controversy, one tied to the continuing fallout from an ancient war, with ramifications for the future of life as we know it. Still reeling from the fact that genies actually exist, Indelbed finds himself on the run. A 'hunt' has been announced, and 10-year-old Indelbed is the prey. And the djinns, as it turns out, are displeased. Kaikobad falls into a supernatural coma, Indelbed and his older cousin, the wise-cracking slacker Rais, learn that Indelbed's dad was in fact a magician - and a trusted emissary to the djinn world.

A drunken loutish widower, he refuses to allow Indelbed go to school, and the only thing Indelbed knows about his mother is the official cause of her early demise: 'Death by Indelbed'.īut when Dr. Kaikobad, is the black sheep of their clan, the once illustrious Khan Rahman family. Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super-dense, super-chaotic third-world capital of Bangladesh. From the author of the cult classic Escape from Baghdad! comes one of The Guardian's best fantasy books of the year.

Djinn city