I feel like I should apologise to the author for reading this book later than I did. I'm so sorry!
I finally had the sheer pleasure of diving into The Coin, which, though slim, felt expansive. I wandered the streets of New York through Zaher’s lens, following a mysterious woman with a CVS basket. Zaher described her character as a "bad woman," but I saw someone fierce, fighting to thrive in a world that plays favorites. Her resilience, especially as she taught life lessons to kids who may be unfairly judged, left me in awe.
With vivid, visceral, poetic, and often hilarious writing, The Coin was a joy from start to finish. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The Coin -
Wowzers, I cannot believe this is a debut. It’s an utterly mind blowing, bonkers read, not at all what I expected, and like the main character, highly unconventional. It centres on the unravelling of a young, wealthy, lonely, but undeniably strong and sexual, Palestinian woman whom has recently emigrated to New York. She (we are never given her name) takes a job as a teacher within an inner city school, where she delivers unconventional ‘free lessons’ about life and morality to her pupils, whom she cares deeply for, and in and amongst many other odd things, she rather randomly picks up a man ‘Trenchcoat’, a stylish homeless man (who turns out to be homosexual) whom acquired her Burberry raincoat which she left by the bins, to move in with her.

The writing style is somewhat like a stream of consciousness and with it comes an intimacy viewing her inner most feelings as she addresses the reader - ‘I’m talking to you’, but conversely, she also shifts to sense of distance, voyeurism as we watch her unravel and we are exposed to her darkest and dirtiest thoughts and feelings, particularly through her rituals of cleansing. The ‘coin’ relates to a coin she swallowed as a child, and one which she imagines is causing discomfort within her. It’s clearly a novel full of metaphors and hidden meaning and I won’t pretend to understand it fully, but it nevertheless what quite an exhilarating but complex read. I highly recommend for those whom are open to a less conventional, rather surreal novel.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC and introducing me to such a unique author.

I will pioneer any book written by a Palestinian or about a Palestinian. Having said that, this book was missing a bit of zest. What was advertised as a "woman unravelling" type story was actually quite tame. Yes she moves to New York and essentially realises life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I’ve never encountered a novel quite like this one. I don’t believe I’ve read anything by a Palestinian author before, and The Coin is a powerful reminder of why I read: to experience different lives and voices. Zaher’s exploration of identity and trauma is raw and unflinching, which may be challenging for readers who prefer their narratives to keep the body sanitized and at a distance. However, this is precisely why I would urge everyone to read this novel—especially in today’s climate. It’s a visceral, thought-provoking, and necessary story.

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🇵🇸🇵🇸The Coin - Yasmin Zaher

The Coin is narrated by a wealthy Palestinian women who teaches in a new York middle school. She has impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. However her ideal self is out of her reach, she is unable to access her inheritance and she cannot return back to her homeland.Her eccentric teaching methods cross boundaries and she befriends a man scheming to sell birkin bags, which she quickly gets involved in. Alongside all of this she fells her cleanliness and purity are at risk from a coin within her.

I felt like there was a lot of hidden meanings in this book that I just didn't understand or see them. I feel the prose was meant to be quite messy to signify the messiness in our narrators life but it was lost on me.

‘The Coin’ is a fascinating debut novel, and packs a lot into a relatively short book. It doesn’t conform into what you’d perhaps expect it to, and it’s all the better for it.

Frankly, I read this book last month, and have struggled to sit down and write this review, simply because I didn’t know how to sum up the book, and my feelings towards it. Yet, for all my inability to construct a review for this book, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. During this time, I even attended a local bookstore event with the author, which was so interesting, and gave me even more to chew over.

In a nutshell, this book is set in New York City, where our unnamed Palestinian protagonist takes on a job at an all boys school, finds herself embroiled in birkin bag pyramids schemes, fixates on the idea of being ‘clean’, and wrestles with the complexities of her heritage and diaspora.

It veers all over the place, yet still leaves us with a fully constructed narrative. It takes us to places we mightn’t be expecting. It’s been likened to Ottessa Moshfegh, and while I’ve only read one book by her, I’m inclined to agree that it would appeal to the same kind of audience.

It’s incredibly well written, occasionally expertly dipping into the surreal, with a protagonist who is sometimes down right unlikeable, yet in a way that always remains understandable. It’s a book I’ve found myself recommending to people, even while still questioning things about it - but I think that’s a large part of the makings of an interesting book. Sometimes things shouldn’t be morally straight forward and spoon fed to us. Sometimes things need to be a little weird, cutting, and down right strange.

It’s a book I see myself rereading in the near future, and a story that has firmly slotted itself into my mind.

Thank you to the publishers, and Netgalley, for the copy to review.

Yasmin Zaher's debut novel, The Coin, tells the story of a Palestinian woman living in New York. Our main character comes from wealth, is a teacher and has an enviable capsule wardrobe. We meet the characters she interacts with, the schemes they get up to and watch her reckon with her life and trauma.

The Coin is thrilling, strange, repulsive and thought-provoking. I would describe its tone and insights as My Year of Rest and Relaxation meets I'm A Fan. A great one for book clubs - lots to unpick and punchy writing. Looking forward to what Zaher does next and congrats on a great debut!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

The Coin is a strange little book and one that I’m sort of on the fence as to how much I enjoyed it. I liked reading it well enough - 3 stars is testament to that - but it was, nevertheless, odd and there didn’t always seem to be a direction to the story (YMMV, unsurprisingly). As such I don’t have much to say in this review. It was definitely a book that stood out from the crowd, with memorable characters, but I didn’t really connect with it beyond that. Hence, 3 stars.

This is a wild romp of a book, taking us through the absurd and wild main character, as she attempts to teach and lead pupils on various adventures. But this book does far more than this- our compelling main character meditates on nature, humanity, and how to exist when her existence is seen as both raw animalism and also refined civilisation.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review.

A visceral tale of a wealthy Palestinian woman who is living in New York. Her attention to her hygiene borders on the obsessive and affects her daily interactions with those around her. She works in a high school where her interactions with teenage boys seems a little strange to say the least. There is meticulous detail highlighting her opulent clothes and the story moves to a scam involving a homeless stranger and Birkin bags. Although the narrator’s voice is original but for me, the story did not gel.

This was a very different story to what I usually read, and I found it quite intriguing as we go along the journey throughout. It was a bit slow for me, but enjoyable all the same.

Thank you to the author, publisher and netgalley for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

"The Coin" by Yasmin Zaher is a very quirky and interesting book. .

A Palestinian woman moves to New York City hoping to live the life she's always dreamed of. Unfortunately, the dream is not all that she hoped. New York is dirty, expensive and her job as a teacher is more challenging than expected. She's trying to find her place in the world, but that's difficult as she continues to believe that a coin she swallowed as a child is embedded in her back.

She has money, but not enough. She has a casual boyfriend, emphasis on casual. She has a job, but she's ambivalent about it. Things take a turn to the slightly unhinged when she travels to Paris as part of a Birkin Bag purchase scheme. This story is never boring.

It's a wild ride, to be sure. If you liked "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," which also featured a fragile woman living in New York City and trying to figure it all out, you'll like "The Coin."

I liked this, I just didn’t love it - the characters were really interesting, and I loved how unreliable the narrator was as she slowly slipped deeper and deeper into her compulsions. The main thing The Coin was lacking for me was a plot, lots of little subplots tick away without really reaching a conclusion - which is fine, it’s just not personally what I tend to enjoy within a narrative.


This is a really interesting and strong debut novel from Yasmin Zaher, the main character is the driving force as she navigates a wealthy but unhappy life in New York. She teaches (arguably quite badly), spends time with a man (one she doesn’t really like or love), and kind of falls into an international con-scheme involving Hermès bags. It’s an interesting novel full of loosely woven threads of plot that never really come together or to an end. The writing is excellent, the plot just wasn’t for me.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is a captivating and thought-provoking read that defies conventional storytelling. The novel follows a Palestinian woman living in New York City, working as a schoolteacher, whose life begins to unravel in unexpected ways. Her involvement with a man running a fake designer handbag operation sets off a series of events that challenge her perceptions and beliefs.

What makes The Coin truly unique is its blend of darkness, reflection, and strangeness. Zaher's writing delves deep into themes of wealth and elitism, the American dream, consumerism, guilt, and cleanliness, offering a multifaceted exploration of these complex issues. The narrative is challenging, yet it pulls the reader into a world that feels both familiar and alien.

The Coin is unlike anything I've read before, in the best way possible. It's a dark, reflective tale that stays with you long after you've turned the last page. Yasmin Zaher has crafted a novel that is as challenging as it is rewarding, offering a fresh perspective on contemporary issues through the lens of a deeply personal story. If you're looking for a book that will make you think and feel deeply, The Coin is a must-read.

Yasmin Zaher’s a Palestinian journalist based in Paris. Her debut novel grew out of her time studying in the U.S. It’s set in 2016, narrated by a young, nameless Palestinian woman who’s recently relocated to New York. Although she’s taken a job in a school, her lifestyle’s largely funded by family money, an inheritance stemming from her parents’ death in a car accident during her childhood. The woman lives in a state of constant vigilance, rigorously policing herself: her environment and her body. She dresses in understated but obviously high-end fashion from Stella McCartney to McQueen. Clothing that partly acts to establish an identity but also forms a kind of protective armour. Although what she’s protecting herself against is unclear. She’s queer, essentially isolated but maintains a desultory bond with wealthy developer Sasha. However, the narrator’s stated desire for detachment, to focus only on her own pleasure, is challenged by her growing affection for her pupils – all boys, mostly Black American, some immigrants, all poor or otherwise marginalised. A group on which she tests out her theories about morality, her conception of how to survive and thrive in an intrinsically corrupt society.

The narrator appears to have succumbed to contemporary capitalism’s dictates, fully invested in consumer culture, flaunting an array of positional goods. In New York her ownership of a Birkin bag marks her out as successful, enviable even. A symbol that possibly overrides her status as ‘other’ in a place where she’s more conscious of the colour of her skin than ever before. It’s clear that here in New York social status resides in how you’re perceived. The Birkin’s especially significant because of its aura of exclusivity, a product deliberately made scarce: ownership not only subject to long waiting lists but to customers proving themselves worthy of the brand. A hierarchy of value that the narrator clearly comprehends: it seems telling that her encounter with a stylish, homeless man, she dubs Trenchcoat, is directly tied to her discarded Burberry raincoat – Burberry of course a brand devalued by its excessive popularity during the late 1990s, still desperate to reinstate its former cachet.

But this outward show of monied sophistication is undermined by the narrator’s private domestic routines. She resorts to increasingly-complicated cleansing rituals, moving from on-trend Korean beauty regimes to brutally scrubbing every inch of her body and her apartment. She’s obsessed with removing the filth and stench of the city, a possible rejection of its culture and values. But she also seems to view herself as defiled. A fixation which partly connects to her past. This past has invaded her body, inside, unreachable, is a coin swallowed during the accident that killed her mother and father. The coin’s a shekel – Israeli currency – yet also a British pound, simultaneously signifying internalised oppression, trauma, the legacy of racism and colonialism. But tied to capitalism too, with its emphasis on the commodification of the self. The narrator’s feeling that she’s both polluted and polluting are intensified by her gender - circulating notions of women as inherently impure. Their acceptability connected to an ability to keep a “clean” house and a “clean” body; rewarded for removing the evidence of their embodiment, their potential “animality,” shaved, plucked, and deodorised. As a woman of colour, the narrator’s growing self-disgust is intensified by living in a country where whiteness signifies virtue, and colourism runs rampant.

Zaher’s narrative’s strongly influenced by Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. Zaher’s themes and preoccupations overlap with Lispector’s particularly her emphasis on masking, loss of authentic selfhood, experiences of displacement and exile. Although Zaher’s novel more accessible than Lispector’s, despite its ambiguities and surreal qualities it’s frequently more reminiscent of the work of writers like Mona Awad and Otessa Moshfegh. In addition, Zaher’s incorporated autobiographical elements, her narrator’s childhood memories of her grandmother replicate Zaher’s own; the narrator’s critique of American society, the shock of its contradictions, its inequalities, its insularity, echo Zaher’s impressions.

As her story unfolds, recounted to an unnamed presence, the narrator slowly unravels. A chance betrayal results in her retreat from the outside world. A retreat that resembles a kind of cathartic, personalised performance art. An attempt to revert to a state of nature, to reclaim her history and her inner self. It’s an intriguing progression but it also felt oddly conventional, contradictory – in danger of reinstating the individualistic underpinnings of the system it’s meant to counter. Like many first novels it’s undoubtedly flawed, slightly unbalanced, sagging in places, but it was frequently arresting, often relatable, and highly readable.

This is a strange novel, maybe it’s a kind of memoir, about a wealthy Palestinian woman coming to live in New York. She arrives with an on-off boyfriend cum benefactor, an apartment and a job in a weird private school but is unable to settle.

Her problem is the dirt of New York and at first she tries to eradicate it in lengthy cleaning rituals bordering on the obsessive. She likes the preadolescent boys she teaches because they are clean in the sense of innocence but, wherever she goes, the dirt seems to be mounting up. The coin in the title refers to a coin which she believes she once swallowed which is now wedged in her back in the area which she can’t reach to clean. This preys on her mental state!

Finally, she cracks and ends up rolling in her own filth, her life in tatters and apparently doomed but then there’s light of the end of the tunnel and the beginnings of a mental and physical recovery.

Why is this bizarre journey readable? To explain it, we need to understand the concept, most commonly associated with the work of Mary Douglas, that dirt is simply matter out of place. Shoes on the dining table are dirty but not the shoes on your feet! Understand that and then, the notion of dirty, as opposed to clean, begins to create a social order where differences are exaggerated. So, the narrator scrubs her body raw and still sees it as filthy.

Her recovery is by coming to terms with dirt and in the simplest way that is achieved by burying herself in filth. Of course, this matters because she is a Palestinian and therefore by definition she is also ‘matter out of place’ but by accepting and befriending the dirt of the city she is also locating herself within it.

Maybe that is a happy ending and perhaps you’ll find the voyage a little too visceral and messy to bear but at least it is possible to make some sense of it and understand the story’s weird appeal!

Yasmin Zaher's debut The Coin was one of my most anticipated 2024 releases. Turns out, this wasn't my kind of thing at all, though I'd press it into the hands of anybody who loves Ottessa Moshfegh, especially My Year of Rest and Relaxation. One thing I did love about The Coin is how thoroughly it smashes any expectations about what fiction written by a Palestinian woman about a Palestinian woman should look like. Its unnamed narrator is wealthy, young and aimless in New York, obsessed with her personal hygiene and increasingly trying out experimental pedagogy with the young teenage boys she teaches. What starts as 'free lessons', where she allows the boys to do what they like, morphs until they become guinea pigs for her own literary and political tastes. On one occasion, she takes them to see a radical poetry reading in New Jersey: 'After the dagger poems, I called for a head count'. The Coin is one of those novels where the blurb promises something that doesn't turn up until halfway through the book and doesn't end up being that important, but the publisher had to say something about what happens. In this case, it's the focus on the narrator getting involved in a scheme to resell Birkin bags, which she does do, but it lasts about twenty pages. The writing is sharper than Moshfegh, for my money, and I particularly liked Zaher's wry observations on beauty routines: 'Two thousand years of snail cream and you will see a woman's brain through her face'; 'I even used a hand mirror for better views, the type women use to be stunned by their vaginas'. We see her conflicted relationship with race as she continually tans to look more visibly Other, then loofahs off the dead skin. And while I struggled to connect with the first three-quarters of the book, I thought Zaher showcased her protagonist's alienation and dispossession cleverly in the surreal final section, which reaches beyond the unravelling woman trope to become something rawer. 3.5 stars.

I really don't know what to make of this book. Its essentially a story about a women unravelling and is a stream of consciousness. The narrative follows a Palestinian woman living in New York and how she lives her life, works and forms relationships. I wouldn't necessarily say there is a plot to this novel and its definitely a character study. I finished this book about a week ago and I'm still trying to form coherent thoughts about it. I think I was intrigued to a certain extent but its not my favourite book. I must say I totally agree with the review from Raven Leilani - this book is definitely filthy and elegant, and Yasmin's writing is very vivid, you can feel the oppressive heat and anxiety when reading. I think this book has a very specific audience that will love it, but unfortunately as someone who is very much here for the plot, this fell a little flat for me, but I would recommend to those who love a character study.

Zaher is definitely a writer to watch. The Coin is centred around a young Palestinian woman who has migrated to New York where she has a job teaching 8th graders in a local boys school. Her teaching methods are pretty unconventional but she certainly engages her pupils and indeed gives them occasional treats, at her personal expense, as she is the beneficiary of a family trust. Her relationships with men certainly unusual and somewhat insensitive. There is a homosexual who gets her to fund him in trading designer handbags and there is a fellow Palestinian with whom she has an on/off sexual relationship. However the constant theme throughout this novel is how she is forever seeking to come to terms with how much she misses Palestine. This sense of loss expresses itself through her experiencing physical discomfort from a coin she believes is still embedded in her back - a coin she swallowed as a child when she lived in Palestine. Her efforts to identify its exact location is one of the many memorable passages in this excellent novel. Another visceral passage is where she recreates a Palestinian landscape in her flat in an effort to re-establish a sense of self.
In summary this is a novel which gives a great voice to the main character who, as a result truly engages the reader. Zaher is to be congratulated on bringing such maturity to this, her first novel.

The Coin was released on July 11th, and is the debut fiction novel from Palestinian journalist & author Yasmin Zaher.

Our narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman who is obsessed with personal hygiene and grooming. Having recently arrived in New York City, she wants to achieve what others in her family could not - the American Dream. Her friend has secured her a job teaching at a middle school in a disadvantaged area, but her teaching methods are... unconventional.

While she may project one image on the outside, things are not all as they seem. Her inheritance is tightly controlled, her homeland fractured, and her desire to live the glamorous life she wants in America seems destined for failure. Her obsession with being clean consumes her.

"When you walk into a woman's house and it's sparkling clean, you never think of all the madness entailed."

The blurb for this book mentions that the central character gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags - but for me, that was only a side plot. The real story was this woman who was struggling to forge an identity for herself while coming to terms with the trauma of having to flee her homeland for America, a place that contributed to her having to leave Palestine in the first place. ("How could the devil be the dream?")

If you're a fan of Weird Little Books™ about interesting, at times odd, insular female characters unravelling, then you might enjoy this.

It's a hard one to describe, because although there are several events taking place (the aforementioned Birkin scheme and the unconventional teaching methods), the woman is the plot. Her desire to have the perfect life, the perfect appearance, access to her inheritance and her homeland all contribute to her slow decline.

At times, I felt that some of it went over my head, but I loved the odd snippet of (very) dark humour and it's one I think about periodically since I read it. I'm not entirely sure I "got" it all, and if you struggle with stream-of-consciousness reads, maybe this isn't for you - but it was different, & it's one I've remembered since I read it.

Thanks so much to @wearefootnote for the #gifted eARC via #Netgalley. #TheCoin