A Master of Djinn
by P. Djèlí Clark
Summary
Cairo in 1912, in a world where a Sudanese mystic tore open the barrier to the realm of the djinn forty years earlier. Egypt consequently industrialised on magic rather than coal, threw the British out, and is now one of the great powers, with airships over the city, mechanical tram angels, and a Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities to keep order.
Agent Fatma el Sha'arawi works for the Ministry. She is small, formidable, dresses in immaculate English suits with a bowler hat, and is one of very few women in the department. Her case is a locked room massacre: an entire secret brotherhood devoted to the mystic al Jahiz burned to death without the room being touched, and a man in a gold mask claiming to be al Jahiz returned.
She is given a partner she did not ask for, Hadia, a new agent in hijab who is competent and cheerful and much better at police work than Fatma expects, and her girlfriend Siti turns out to have commitments of her own.
Clark builds the alternate Cairo with real affection and real detail, and the politics, suffrage marches, class resentment among the djinn labourers, colonial powers circling, are as present as the magic.
The djinn are the best invention. They are ancient, bored, contractually bound, and have taken jobs: a djinn runs a tram maintenance depot, another keeps a bar, and all of them find human legal procedure exhausting.
Around four hundred pages, brisk, funny and plotted as a fair mystery with a solution you can reach.
Fatma and Hadia's slow shift from resentment to partnership is the emotional line, and the book is unusually good on the specific irritation of being assigned a junior colleague you did not want.
Best for readers who want a detective novel with djinn in it, and one of the most enjoyable secondary worlds in recent fantasy.
Historical Context & Significance
A Master of Djinn won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Compton Crook Award and the Ignyte Award.
It is the first full novel in P. Djeli Clark's Dead Djinn universe, which began with the novelette A Dead Djinn in Cairo and the novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015, both featuring the same Ministry.
Clark is a historian by training, with academic work on slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, and the alternate Egypt is built on a specific counterfactual: an independent, industrialised African power at the moment when the real Egypt was under British occupation, hosting an international peace conference on the eve of a world war that may not now happen the same way.