The Coin by Yasmin Zaher — full book breakdown including genre, page count, audiobook length and narrator, publisher’s synopsis, content notes, author bio, and additional reader notes. Includes direct links to Goodreads, The Storygraph, and featured book lists. Everything you need to know before you read.
The Coin
Yasmin Zaher
Overview: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is a standout read featured on Slay the Page. Discover the genre, page count, audiobook length and narrator, synopsis, content notes, publisher information, and author details before you dive in. This book was selected as Natalie Portman’s Book Club pick for February 2025.
Book Details: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
Genre: Literary Fiction
Page Count: 240 Pages (Hardcover)
Audiobook Length: 6 Hours, 3 Minutes
Narrator: Sarah Agha
Publisher: Catapult Books
Publication Date: July 9, 2024
Featured In: Celebrity Book Club Picks – Natalie Portman’s Book Club (February 2025)
Get More Info: Goodreads | The Storygraph
Publisher’s Description of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.
The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is published by Catapult Books.
Content Notes: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher includes content that may be sensitive, emotional, or potentially distressing for some readers, including themes of mental illness, classism, sexual content, suicidal ideations, among others. For more detailed information, reader-submitted content notes are available on The StoryGraph.
Who The Coin by Yasmin Zaher Is Perfect For
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is perfect for readers who are drawn to fragmented, cerebral fiction that dissects identity, alienation, and the weight of inherited trauma. The Coin—originally written in Hebrew by a Palestinian author— is a nonlinear, philosophical novel that explores a young woman’s interior life as she moves between languages, cultures, and histories. If you appreciate experimental works in the vein of Jenny Erpenbeck or Samanta Schweblin, this debut will challenge and absorb you in equal measure.
About the Author: Yasmin Zaher
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel (Goodreads, 2025).
View Yasmin Zaher’s Goodreads author profile for a full list of books, ratings, and reader reviews.
Book Lists Featuring The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is featured in the following posts:
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