# The Thirty Names of Night

> Zeyn Joukhadar's luminous novel braids a closeted Syrian American trans artist, a vanished painter, and a rare bird into a story of grief, transformation and finding the name that fits.

Price: 16.95 USD · in stock

## About
Haunted by his late mother and unable yet to speak his own name aloud, a young Syrian American artist follows the trail of a woman who vanished decades before, and in her story begins to find the shape of his own.What it's aboutZeyn Joukhadar's novel moves between two lives. In the present, a closeted trans man in New York, grieving his mother and quietly stalled in his art, stumbles on the journals of Laila Z, a Syrian American painter of birds who disappeared in the mid-twentieth century. As he pieces together her past, and the mystery of a rare bird she once painted, his search becomes inseparable from the harder work of naming and claiming who he is. The two narratives, decades apart, gradually reach toward each other.ThemesTransformation is the book's beating heart, in gender and grief, in art and in migration. Joukhadar writes tenderly about diaspora and the Syrian American community, about mothers and inheritance, about the way a name can be both a cage and a homecoming. Birds recur throughout as images of flight, watchfulness and metamorphosis.Why it still mattersThis is a contemporary novel of rare emotional generosity, giving voice to trans and immigrant experience with lyricism rather than argument. It insists that identity is something discovered and made, not merely assigned, and it does so through a story that honours the past while reaching for a freer future.Who it's forReaders who love richly poetic literary fiction, stories of the Arab American diaspora, and narratives of queer and trans self-becoming. Anyone moved by intergenerational storytelling and the search for belonging will find much to hold onto here.

## Specifications
- language: en
- format: paperback