“How different the world would look if it had any mercy towards migrations undertaken as a last resort against annihilation.”

Zeyn Joukhadar’s novel, THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT, is an intimate, intergenerational saga centered on a trans artist in search of himself, his community and answers to the questions his mother left behind.

This is a story about becoming, of the fraught, unwieldy processes of many migrations. The migration of birds, steady and magic at once. The migration from Syria to New York, the unnaming that is performed at the borders, the displacement and built community of diaspora on fragile ground that does not belong and never belonged to the colonizer. The migration of the self in grief, specifically when grieving a parent, knowing they will never know the person you become. The migration of trans identity, a movement towards a self that is a home, a healing, a truth.

"Lyric, poetic and deeply wise, THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT is a radiant work of fiction that feels like an outright act of healing. Joukhadar weaves an intimate story across generations, and he ties them together in a way that’s both viscerally satisfying and openly enchanting."

It’s been five years since his mother died in a fire that nearly killed him too. A closeted Syrian American trans boy is in search of his name. He can’t paint since her death, save for the vast murals he crafts on the sides of buildings in Little Syria. His grief takes the shape of her body, present as he tries to create, present in the space he shares with Teta, his grandmother. His life shifts when he discovers the old journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z., whose secrets intertwine with his mother’s and his grandmother’s more closely than he ever could have imagined. Especially for diaspora kids, for those of us whose histories have been obscured and deliberately marginalized, there is so much to learn about where we came from.

Nearly nothing of New York is what it was. From the genocide of the Lenape to the ongoing erasure of gentrification, it’s a shifting city built on endings. But it’s also a space of community --- a queer and trans immigrant community --- of chosen family and the joy that comes only from a person given the space to explore, find themselves and name themselves.

This is a story about community, how constructed systems of power work to destroy queer and trans people of color and the immigrant community at the root, as well as resilience, even though it should not be necessary just to survive. How found family is a lifesaving thing, a freeing remaking that allows for the multitudes of shifting truths we can hold.

This is a story about the body --- about gender dysphoria and gender euphoria; the many layers of coming into nonbinary and transmasculine identity; the everyday traumas of being trans, from the indignity and outright danger of improper healthcare, to the ever-present threat of violence, to the misplaced, well-meaning dagger of sentiment from a family friend in the shape of You look just like your mother. It explores the possibilities of masculinity outside of white cisheteronormativity, that lives inside the contradiction of, when at last presented with another person who shares at least some of his experiences with gender, “I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.” And that’s what this masterpiece of a book will do for so many readers.

This is a story about grief and memory. The ways in which ghosts speak through us, the physicality of how a parent’s ghost can haunt a body. The secret histories of our loved ones, the stories that were kept from us but that lived nonetheless. How when it comes to the rippling violence of the graveyard that is this nation, the act of remembering is not resistance enough.

Every single page of this novel is incandescent in its precise, propulsive beauty. Lyric, poetic and deeply wise, THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT is a radiant work of fiction that feels like an outright act of healing. Joukhadar weaves an intimate story across generations, and he ties them together in a way that’s both viscerally satisfying and openly enchanting. This is a love letter to a queer and trans community, Syrian American immigrants, the act of art and of naming oneself, and our place in the world, among other migratory creatures. Joukhadar gives us unapologetically queer and trans immigrant catharsis in the wake of unimaginable destruction and grief.

Powerful, poignant and deliberately hopeful, its far-reaching impact makes THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT a modern classic that is sure to dazzle readers for a long time. But I also can’t imagine a book that I needed more this particular year. It is one of my all-time favorite novels.