Chakraborty builds a fantasy world as intricate and intriguing as its Middle Eastern setting. These two strands converge when Nahri enters the city and Ali’s royal family and their enemies attempt to use Nahri’s miraculous arrival to their advantage. Within the city, Prince Ali funds a fundamentalist djinn faction without his father’s approval.

While Nahri and Dara fight ifrit (ghouls) and other enemies on their way, Daevabad is on the verge of crisis. The djinn, Dara, introduces Nahri to a world she never thought existed, and the two begin an adventure that will lead them to the mythical city of Daevabad, where Nahri will be well-received-but Dara may not be. When an exorcism goes awry, she accidentally summons a djinn warrior. In 18th-century Cairo, Nahri is on the verge of saving enough to study real medicine, but for now she ekes out an existence as a con artist, healing with powers she doesn’t quite understand nor can she control. Can two young adults maintain their own ideals amid a swirl of politics and age-old family feuds? That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.Īfter all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. Spurning Dara's warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father's corrupt regime. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.

In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass-a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by-palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing-are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.īut when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she's forced to reconsider her beliefs. Certainly, she has power on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she's a con woman of unsurpassed talent.

The city of brass novel