JEDDAH: The 2024 novel “The Coin,” is the dizzying debut of Jerusalem-born Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher, which hones in on the female body, and is written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative style.

Titled after a shekel coin the unnamed female protagonist believes she swallowed as a child, and is rusting and decomposing in her, the novel is essentially about an affluent yet displaced woman’s exploration — on her own terms —  of the pain and pleasures of life.

Zaher writes about the unraveling, or rather the becoming, of a Palestinian woman who moves to New York City with the hope of starting life afresh as a schoolteacher.

The coin is “resurrected” here, amid the dirt and poverty that plagues the American city, which the protagonist describes as: “How could the devil be the dream?” It seems to manifest as discomfort, linking the traumas of the past to her present.

The narrator befriends a homeless, yet elegant man whom she gets embroiled with in a Birkin scam. This is an exploration of the cosmopolitan city life’s obsession with consumerism and materialism, as well as the performative and elitist nature of fashion and wealth.

With a closet full of designer pieces, the woman’s refined taste in fashion is a ruse to help her navigate societal expectations against the call of her inner self. She asks herself: “I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned?”

She is from Palestine, which she describes as “neither a country, nor the third world, it was its own thing.”

Moving to the Big Apple in pursuit of home and her ideal self, this triggers obsessive cleaning rituals because the city “embraced the dirt like it was an aesthetic.”

As a woman from a country under occupation, her own body becomes the site of power struggles, a site of cleansing rather than being ethnically cleansed out.

Her protagonist says “the women in my family placed lot of importance on being clean … perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.”

The narrative is mercurial in its depiction of her cleansing rituals that are juxtaposed with glimmers of violent and disturbing psychopathic thoughts, making her not just an intriguing protagonist to read, but an elusive one.

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Author: Eckhart Tolle

“A New Earth” by German writer Eckhart Tolle is a transformative work published originally in 2005 before it was selected in 2008 for Oprah’s Book Club and was featured in a series of weekly webinars with Tolle and Winfrey.

Tolle, a spiritual teacher and bestselling author of several books such as “The Power of Now” and “Stillness Speaks,” writes that most of the struggle people go through is not an outcome of external factors but a result of what is happening inside the mind.

The self-help book invites readers to reflect on and understand their egos. By bringing awareness to human nature and ego’s impact on behavior, the author encourages readers to shift their thoughts from the negative thinking that might be clouding their experience of living in the present moment.

Tolle stresses the importance of recognizing ego, as opposed to the actual self, as a mental pattern constructed through habits rather than facts or realistic ideas of one’s true personality.

In doing so, people will be able to have a flexible mindset, allow growth, and start aligning their actions with core values and inner wisdom, Tolle notes.

The author also talks about the negative feelings that some people might experience during the process of personal development and challenges them to accept themselves regardless, even when faced with complicated emotions.

“A New Earth” is a great choice for readers who search for deep insights, wish to let go of old habits that do not serve them, and embrace a more fulfilling way of thinking.