The Night Counter: A Novel-Quality Guarantee

Description

“An immigrant-ethnic cocktail laced with political oppression, but before shaking, [Alia Yunis] adds Scheherazade, the fabled storyteller who kept herself alive by distracting her tyrannical husband for a thousand and one nights.” –Carolyn See, Washington Post

After 85 years, Fatima knows that she is dying because for the last 991 days she has been visited by the immortal storyteller from The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade.

Just as Scheherazade spun magical stories for 1,001 nights to save her ownlife, Fatima has spent each night telling Scheherazade her life stories. But with only nine days left before her death, Fatima has a few loose ends to tie up. She mustfind a wife for her openly gay grandson, teach Arabic (and birth control) to her17-year-old great-granddaughter, make amends with her estranged husband, and decidewhich of her troublesome children should inherit her family’s home in Lebanon–ahouse she herself has not seen in nearly 70 years.

Fatima’s children are spread far apart and are wrapped up in their own chaotic lives seemingly disinterested in their mother and their inheritances. But as she weaves stories of her husband, children, andgrandchildren, Fatima brings together a family that is both capricious and steadfast, affectionate and also smothering, connected yet all together, they present a striking and surprising tapestry of modernArab American life.

Shifting between America and Lebanon over the last hundredyears, Alia Yunis crafts a bewitching debut novel imbued with great humanity, imagination, family drama and a touch of magic prepared to feel utterly charmed.