The Map of Salt and Stars
In 2011, the peace of the Syrian city of Homs is disturbed by protests and shelling. A young girl, Nour, is forced to flee across the Levant and North Africa in search of safety.
800 years before, Rawiya, disguised as a boy and apprenticed to a famous map maker, set out on an epic quest to chart the globe, following the very same route.
In The Map of Salt & Stars, the tales of these two heroines coming of age in perilous times interweave, and shine a light on a country in turmoil, human resilience and the power of stories.
Review
Full of tension and love and danger. This is a beautifully told, magical novel about journeys and finding your way home. (STYLIST)
The interweaving of the two stories is skilfully done... Joukhadar can be congratulated on an unusual first novel. (MAIL ON SUNDAY)
A gorgeous and timely story (THE ARAB DAILY NEWS)
Joukhadar's prose is like a dream, which is fitting for this pair of stories, one drawn from fantastical legend, the other from nightmarish current events from which Syria has yet to awaken. (SEATTLE TIMES)
A spellbinding geography of family and hope. (SHELF AWARENESS)
Scheherazade's "The Thousand and One Nights" meets Alan Gratz's "Refugee" in this important debut novel ...There are parts that will make your heart stop and parts that will make it beat again. It's an incredible force. (WILDLY READ)
After the death of her beloved father, imaginative 11-year-old Nour leaves New York City, where she was born, and returns home with her cartographer mother and two older sisters to the family's native Syria, where bombs released by Assad's forces soon destroy their home and send them on a desperate flight across North Africa. More than 800 years earlier, Rawiya, the daughter of an impoverished widow, disguises herself as a boy and leaves medieval Ceuta-modern Spain's foothold on the African coast-and apprentices herself to a mapmaker, traveling with him throughout the Levant. The stories are deftly interwoven, for Nour's father has told her about Rawiya's fabulous, sometimes mythic adventures. Parallels abound, from the spunky, triumphant heroines to mapmaking as a key to finding oneself to the special stone Nour hunts, once the eye of a terrifying winged creature battled by Rawiya. Debut novelist Joukhadar gracefully balances the gritty, often horrific truth of the refugee's plight with the lyrical near-fairy tale she has created (in both time periods), layered with burnished hope and occasionally overplayed sentiment.
VERDICT A wise, vibrantly told story for a wide range of readers, particularly relevant now.
(Library Journal)
The Map of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them. (BOOK PAGE)
This imaginative yet very real look into war-torn Syria is a must. (BOOK LIST ONLINE)
A very good book, and an important, eye-opening one too. (INTERZONE)
About the Author
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar is a Syrian American author, and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). Originally from New York City, Jennifer was born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. After earning her PhD in the Pathobiology Graduate Program at Brown University, she worked as a biomedical research scientist before switching careers to pursue writing full time. Jennifer's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in THE KENYON REVIEW, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, PANK MAGAZINE, GULF STREAM LITERARY MAGAZINE, THE NORMAL SCHOOL, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She has also previously published work under the name Jennifer Zeynab Maccani.
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