NO GOD BUT US

A sprawling, tender debut about queer refugees finding each other across continents.

A mother’s anguished cry—“Who is this djinn in my house?”—is the starting point for a familiar queer odyssey: the tumultuous journey of exile and salvation. The djinn in this case is Delbar, an Afghan American student in Washington, D.C., moonlighting at a drag bar in a riveting opening chapter. Meanwhile, on another continent, Mansur supports his mother and sister while navigating the dangers of being a queer Afghan refugee in Iran. Outed to their families, both men flee their homes. Sayed’s debut traces their parallel journeys, in alternating chapters, to Istanbul, a way station where displaced lives converge. Through an organization supporting queer migrants, Delbar and Mansur join a rambunctious community of LGBTQ+ refugees, including Anahita, an Iranian trans woman whose fierce and brittle wit makes her one of the book’s most memorable characters. They smoke, bicker, nurse each other’s wounds, and insist on joy in the face of daily threats. When a Pride march is violently suppressed by police, its consequences ripple through the makeshift family. While Delbar moves through the world as a romantic, imagining himself “[James] Baldwin in his bohemian Turkish years,” Mansur is more clear-eyed, shaped by a sense of responsibility for those he left behind. When he reflects that “a hundred empires have come and tried to fix Afghanistan.…No one will fix it but us,” you feel the accumulated weight of his experience. Sayed weaves together geopolitics, queer history, Persian poetry, and the textures of daily life in exile, but those expecting Delbar and Mansur to ride off into the sunset together will be disappointed. The novel is too wise for such easy comforts. Their connection is real but provisional, like everything else in exile.

At its core, this is that rare thing: a political novel that remembers to be a human one.