The Map of Salt and Stars
Twelve-year-old Nour has just moved with her widowed mother and two older sisters from New York City back to Homs, Syria, when the war reaches their street. As their home is destroyed and her mother decides to flee, Nour carries with her the stories her father used to tell, in particular the legend of Rawiya, a twelfth-century apprentice who disguised herself as a boy to study cartography under the great Arab geographer al-Idrisi at the court of King Roger II. Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar braids the two journeys together: Nour and her family crossing the same ancient routes by truck, by boat, and on foot through Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco; Rawiya and her master mapping the coastline a thousand years earlier with ink and astrolabe. The result is a debut novel about migration as old as the Mediterranean and as new as the morning's news, written with a poet's attention to color, language, and grief.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After her father's death, twelve-year-old Nour and her family return from Manhattan to relatives in Homs, just as the Syrian war begins. Across the route they take through Jordan, Egypt, and Libya, Nour retells the old story of Rawiya, a girl apprenticed to the twelfth-century mapmaker al-Idrisi.
The Map of Salt and Stars was written by Zeyn Joukhadar and published in 2018. It is structured as parallel narratives of a 12th-century mapmaker's apprentice and a contemporary Syrian refugee girl.
Yes. The Map of Salt and Stars won the Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. Zeyn Joukhadar later won the Lambda Literary Award for The Thirty Names of Night.
The Map of Salt and Stars is 360 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Map of Salt and Stars takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Map of Salt and Stars is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Map of Salt and Stars is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.