The City of Brass

Nahri has never believed in magic. To her it is a con — a way to survive on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, palming coins and reading marks while quietly ignoring the healing touch that seems to work on the sick no matter how little faith she puts in it.

Then a careless line of an old song, sung during one of her sham exorcisms, summons a warrior who should not exist: Dara, a daeva bound to a history Nahri knows nothing about, who insists her gifts are the mark of a long-vanished royal line.

Pursued by creatures out of legend, the two flee toward Daevabad, the fabled brass-walled city of the djinn. It is a place of soaring beauty and old wounds — six tribes forced to share one throne, a ruling family that keeps an uneasy peace, and a growing underclass of mixed-blood shafit who have had enough of being despised. Into this Nahri walks as the last of a family everyone believed extinct, a symbol some will kill for and others will use.

Inside the palace, the king's devout younger son, Ali, has quietly aligned himself with those agitating for the shafit, a loyalty that could cost him everything.

As Nahri learns the rules of a court where a wrong word is as deadly as a blade, she discovers that the line between ally and enemy — and between duty and desire — is far thinner than it looks.

S. A. Chakraborty's debut opens the Daevabad Trilogy with a richly imagined world of Middle Eastern myth, palace intrigue, and hard questions about power and belonging.