The Night Counter

The Night Counter by Alia Yunis tells the story of Fatima Abdullah, an aging woman who emigrated from Lebanon to America seventy years ago. For the past 991 nights, she has been visited by Scheherazade, the immortal storyteller of The Arabian Nights. Fatima believes that on the 1,001st night, she will die, and so in between telling stories of her life to Scheherazade, she is trying to tie up her loose ends, like planning her funeral, finding a woman to marry her grandson (hard to do in nine days no matter what, and even less likely in this case because he’s openly gay), and deciding who should inherit her home in Lebanon. To make things even more difficult, the house where she lives with her grandson is under surveillance by two photographers who want to trade their days as paparazzi for a career with the FBI, and who suspect them of Al Qaeda connections. Scheherazade, who surprisingly is not a hallucination, amuses herself in between visits to Fatima by dropping in, unobserved, on the rest of her large family, filling in the gaps in the versions of events that Fatima knows in order to create an epic family saga squeezed into nine nights of events and memories.

-- Kristen, Main Library