Penguin Random House, Belletristik, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Englisch, Shubnum Khan, 2024)

Rebecca and The House of Spirits meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for misfits, seeking to forget their pasts and disappear into the mansions dark corridors. Until Sana. She and her father are the latest of Akbar Manzil&rsquo s long list of tenants, seeking a new home after suffering painful loss. Unlike the others, who choose not to look too closely at the mansion&rsquo s unsettling qualities&mdash the strange assortment of bones in the overgrown garden, the mysterious figure seen to move sometimes at night&mdash she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion. To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects&mdash and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades. Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time, with faded photographs of a couple in love and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, the original owner&rsquo s second wife, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room&rsquo s shadows is a grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who once loved Meena and has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena&rsquo s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, awakening the memories of the house itself&mdash and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl&rsquo s search for belonging.