Alif the Unseen is a masterful debut novel, an enchanting, incredibly timely adventure tale worthy of Neil Gaiman. In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker protects watched groups from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble—until he falls in love with the wrong woman and unleashes a forbidden text thought to be written by the jinn.

As the book opens, Alif’s computer has just been breached by the “Hand of God,” as the hackers call the state’s electronic security force, and he is scrambling to protect his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other vulnerable groups in autocratic states across the region. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and when it turns out the fiance is the Hand, and the state security forces come after Alif with guns drawn, he must go underground, trying all the while to fight back against a piece of code he wrote to protect his lover but which the Hand is using to create the most sophisticated state surveillance the world has ever known. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, has fallen into his hands and may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death.

I’m an effrit. And I’ve got a two-year-old Dell desktop in the back that’s had some kind of virus for ages. The screen goes black five minutes after I turn the damn thing on. I have to do a hard reboot every time.
Alif felt a new vista of serendipitous opportunity open before him.
“You’ve got internet in the Empty Quarter?” he asked in an awed voice.
Cousin, said the shadow,We’ve got WiFi.

When Alif realizes that the Djinn-authored book, Alf Yeom can provide a blue-print for an entirely new way of coding, and simply sits down with his little netbook and spontaneously writes code based not on 1s and 0s, but on metaphor, creating something transcendent and nearly divine, it’s not just implausible. It’s nonsensical.

“The Hand roused. It lumbered to its feet, reeking of ionized air and dry metallic bones, revealing a level of functionality Alif had not detected. He reeled backward, recalibrating. Breaching the confines of the State intranet”

With shades of Neal Stephenson, Philip Pullman, and The Thousand and One Nights, Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is a tour de force that will enchant readers—a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology, and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.

About the Author

G. Willow Wilson is the author of the acclaimed novel The Bird King (2019), co-creator of the Hugo and American Book Award-winning series Ms. Marvel (2013-2018), and has written for some of the world’s best-known superhero comic book series, including The X-Men, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Her first novel, Alif the Unseen, won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, was a finalist for the Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2015, she won the Graphic Literature Innovator Prize at the PEN America Literary Awards. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Seattle.