Faruq Zaidi would be the first to admit that he hasn’t “gotten over” the death of his father a year earlier. He has inherited the family brownstone. Although his aunties keep coming over (even after he has changed the locks) to check up on him and clean up after him, he refuses to move his father’s AirPods, which still lie where he dropped them.

If pressed, Faruq might even admit that he hasn’t recovered from the death of his mother decades earlier, just a week before 9/11, at a time when overwhelming fear and prejudice against brown-skinned Americans like himself (he’s Pakistani American) subsumed all other emotions. His mother’s death, in part, caused him to privately abandon the Islamic faith that was so important to his father. But with his father no longer alive, what’s left for Faruq to believe in now that he doesn’t have to maintain the charade of following his father’s faith?

"Faruq’s present-day story is interspersed with two other narratives in Nicole Cuffy’s remarkable second novel.... The intertwined narratives help expand the novel’s scope and uncover parallels that resurface again and again."

Faruq, who writes for a magazine specializing in long-form journalism, gladly accepts an assignment to immerse himself in a community known only as “the nameless.” Its members vehemently insist that their community is not a cult, but many of them have begun living in an isolated area larger than Manhattan, well hidden among the redwoods in far northern California. Faruq hopes to meet the group’s leader, a Black Vietnam War veteran known only as Odo. Odo claims to have received the nameless’s 18 Utterances from a being known as Vutu and instantaneously absorbed an entire belief system centered on eliminating the “distortions” that have ruined modern life and obscure beauty and truth, leading only to depression, disillusionment, violence and war.

Faruq is cautiously intrigued by what he finds in the so-called Forbidden City. It’s hard not to be seduced, on some level, by the Instagrammable color coordination and the uniform attractiveness of the nameless’s followers. He is welcomed with open arms and finds himself trusting Odo and other community members almost despite himself, especially when they provide him with unusual opportunities and the space to write. But there’s still an undercurrent of suspicion that he can’t quite let go of.

Faruq’s present-day story is interspersed with two other narratives in Nicole Cuffy’s remarkable second novel. One is told in the form of a screenplay (complete with musical cues) from a documentary film called Nero that brought the nameless to national attention a couple of years earlier. It chronicled a bitter conflict between the nameless and a small town in Texas where the group attempted to form roots, clashing with the local evangelical Christian church community with near-disastrous results.

The other narrative takes place in 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam, during the war. There we meet several soldiers, primarily a group of Black soldiers called “bloods.” On some level, we will understand that one of these bloods is destined to become the leader known as Odo. However, since they all go by nicknames in the jungle, and since Odo is also a new name that the founder took on later in life, it’s unclear until the book’s final pages which of the soldiers is the man in question.

This narrative is tense and bloody, and as dark and somber as most war stories are. In the end, it doesn’t fully explain Odo’s trajectory, but it does raise questions about the nature of religious inspiration, just as the Texas story raises questions about the fuzzy lines between mainstream religions and what most people would call a cult.

O SINNERS! is fascinating on several levels. The intertwined narratives help expand the novel’s scope and uncover parallels that resurface again and again. It offers plenty of space for consideration of what it means to belong to a community, how we create and suppress the narratives that shape us, and the shifting lines between faith and doubt.