Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize Shortlisted for the Swansea Dylan Thomas Prize Longlisted
for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice 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 an intercontinental
scheme reselling Birkin bags. But America is stifling her—her willfulness 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 civilization beauty and justice class and belonging—all while resisting easy
moralizing. Provocative wry and inviting The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary
voice. "[A] smart sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling
hallucinogenic plot The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrator’s grandmother’s garden
in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles between her
grandfather’s birthplace of Bisan—'now a low-income town in Israel housing mostly Jewish
families from Morocco and no Palestinians'—Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display
appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional funny in an
absurdist way like the narrator’s existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and
the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novel’s power is not in cohesion but in
chaos." —Lauren Christensen The New York Times Book Review
