A Master of Djinn

Returning to the bustling streets of the alternate 1912 Cairo first visited in the novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo, Clark’s stunning full-length debut follows the adventures of Fatma el-Sha’arawi, a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities. Decades earlier, the prophet al-Jahiz eliminated the separation of magical and non-magical realms, forever altering the world before disappearing from the public eye. Now members of a brotherhood dedicated to al-Jahiz’s legacy turn up murdered. When Fatma is called in to investigate the crime, she discovers the perpetrator to be a man of rare magical abilities who claims to be the returned al-Jahiz himself. Together with her clever partner, Agent Hadia Abdel Hafez, and her girlfriend, Siti, Fatma sets out to uncover the truth behind this self-professed prophet. With this fantastic feat of postcolonial imagination, Clark reconfigures history with a keen, critical eye toward gender, class, and imperialism. Meanwhile, the colorful prose and thorough worldbuilding allow readers to truly enter this imagined world. An epic tale of magic and mystery, this is sure to wow.[em] (May) [/em]