Fire in the Unnameable Country

"The 1001 Nights of its time—rooms opening into rooms, stories into stories, in the same literary mansion as Calvino, Burroughs, and other metafabulist satirists: horrifying, funny, written in a language all its own."—Margaret Atwood"Ghalib Islam has written one of the buzziest novels of the season."—Toronto LifeThe universe is shaking as Hedayat, the "glossolalist" narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents...