Brother alive A novel

Three boys--Youssef, Iseul, Dayo--are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers--from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria--are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys' adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi Arabia with the infants, raising them on the top floor of Staten Island's Occident Street Mosque, where he's known simply as Iman Salim. The boys' upbringing is haphazard at best. "I have no interest in being your father," Salim states, but at least they always have each other. When Salim returns to Saudi Arabia almost 20 years later, the boys eventually follow to the land of their provenance. Confronting religious intolerance, homophobia, capitalist greed, and bioweapons, Zain presents a debut novel in five parts with an epistolary reveal; four are Youssef's letters to his niece Ruhi, one is the boys' origin story via Salim, and the final chapter belongs to the titular, otherworldly Brother. Riotous with erudition, including phrases like "his Lacanian understanding of symbolic corporate structures," Zain's multilayered, nonlinear narrative turns unwieldy and ultimately disappointing as an exercise in sly cleverness rather than rewarding storytelling.

DEBUT Khalid's truly genre-defying work, one the most exciting debuts in recent years, tells the story of three adopted brothers--Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef--raised by an imam in Staten Island. As the trio reaches adulthood, lifelong mysteries begin to unravel, and the brothers are forced to follow their adoptive father to a futuristic city being built by radicals in Saudi Arabia. As intelligent as it is imaginative, the novel attacks various systems of control--religion, yes, but more explicitly capitalism--that would strip people of their very humanity. Here are the impossibly blurred lines between the personal and the global, East and West, godly and godless; it's where man's soul is said to be an invoice, and geopolitics infects all. Khalid's vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it's also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness. It's a love story--many times over, actually--wrapped inside a searing indictment, a rage against the many machines that would sacrifice people at the altar of capital. That Khalid executes a novel this intricate, elegant, and compassionate with such masterly prose all but guarantees that this will be one of the finest works of literature this year. VERDICT Blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory.--Luke Gorham

A Staten Island mosque becomes the unlikely center of an outsize conflict around faith and family. Khalid's bulky, ambitious debut novel is largely narrated by Youssef, one of three unrelated children adopted by Salim, an imam who spirited them out of Saudi Arabia under mysterious circumstances. Much of the story is concerned with exploring that mystery, braided around a plot about fractures within the Muslim faith. Along with his adopted brothers, Dayo and Iseul, Youssef snoops around the mosque and learns about the complex reasons for their departure and how it relates to Salim's closeted homosexuality. Adding a dash of surreality to an already disorienting situation is Brother, a shape-shifting double who shadows Youssef, serving as a kind of animal familiar and manifestation of his mood. (At various points, Brother is a capuchin monkey, a cat, a bat, a hen, a cocker spaniel, and more.) In time, Youssef realizes he's enmeshed in a bigger conflagration between Salim and a rival imam in Saudi Arabia who strives to pharmaceutically convert nonbelievers and leads a techno-futuristic compound in the country that's as corrupt as it is glittering. (It's modeled after an actual project, Neom, a planned "smart city" under construction.) Khalid has plenty to say about art, relationships, religion, and family, and he gives Youssef an appealingly wry and questioning voice. But the novel creaks from its overabundance of ambition--wanting to be a domestic novel, satire of faith, critique of petrocapitalism, myth-soaked allegory, and (in its latter stages) techno-thriller, it's constantly in search of a center. Whatever power Brother might have as a symbol for hidden lives and alternate existences is sapped by the busy plotting. Khalid has an admirably encyclopedist instinct, but he's set an almost impossibly high bar for storytelling. A big-picture saga about faith that gets lost in the details. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.