Paperback Published March 12, 2019. (Hardcover Published May 1, 2018)
This rich, moving, and lyrical debut novel is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan; the story of two girls living eight hundred years apart—a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker—places today’s headlines in the sweep of history, where the pain of exile and the triumph of courage echo again and again.
"The ancient, sometimes mystical connection between maps, people, and knowledge is central to Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar's The Map of Salt and Stars, a double tale of voyage and exile that moves between contemporary war-torn Syria and the caravansaries and khans of its lost past....What Joukhadar does beautifully is to connect, in a vivid and urgent way, Syria and the United States.... The Map of Salt and Stars is important and timely becasue it shows how interconnected two supposedly opposing worlds can be. Our many stories are part of the same larger tale, part of the same larger map." ( The New York Times Book Review)
“In Joukhadar’s intoxicating debut, the past and present are brought to life, illuminating how, in exile, neither can exist without the other. With clear, exquisite prose, Joukhadar unspools a brightly imagined tale of family and grief, mapmaking and migration. This important book is a love letter to the vanished—and to what remains.” (Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses)
