Alif the Unseen

Alif is only a handle. Its owner is a young hacker, part Arab and part Indian, in the City, the capital of an unnamed emirate on the Persian Gulf, and from his room he sells protection from state surveillance to anyone who needs it: Islamists, communists, feminists. When Intisar, the wealthy girl he loves, breaks off their affair without explanation and he learns she is to marry a man her family has chosen, Alif writes a program, Tin Sari, to keep her from ever seeing him online. Her fiancé turns out to be the Hand, a prince who hunts dissidents through their computers, and soon afterward the Hand breaks into Alif's.

Alif runs. He takes with him Dina, the pious neighbor he has known since childhood and whose face he has not seen in the ten years since she took the veil, and a strange old book Intisar has sent him: the Alf Yeom, The Thousand and One Days, a collection of tales said to be told by the jinn. Their flight leads them to Vikram the Vampire, a handsome underworld fixer whose knees, glimpsed from the corner of the eye, bend the wrong way, and into the hidden world of the jinn; to an American convert who knows antique books; and to a mosque where they shelter from the police. Alif tries to use the Alf Yeom to build a quantum computer, is captured and interrogated, and is freed months later by a hacker called NewQuarter01. In the climax, amid internet blackouts and riots in the City, the Hand is lynched by the crowd and Alif and Dina escape.

Wilson mixes computer code, Islamic theology and the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights, and the mix is the book's charm. It is long and busy, though. Kirkus admired an ambition it likened to Neil Gaiman's but found the tale plodding and "overstuffed with left turns," and readers without patience for technical talk may skim. In Salon, Laura Miller was reminded of "the energetic plotting of Philip Pullman, the nimble imagery of Neil Gaiman and the intellectual ambition of Neal Stephenson." It suits readers of those three, and anyone who wants a fantasy set in the Arab world and written with real care for its faith.