Yasmin Zaher’s remarkable novel The Coin has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40.
This is not a story that begins at the beginning. Instead, its narrator starts with dirt and an obsession with cleanliness, but suggests later that the coin of the title – an Israeli shekel that she accidentally swallowed on a family road trip in which her parents were killed in a car crash – would have been an equally appropriate place to begin.
Long forgotten, the swallowed coin begins to make its presence felt, somewhere in her body, following her move to America. The narrator is a wealthy young Palestinian woman, teaching boys at a New York City middle school. Her wealth, however, is in the hands of a brother who controls her allowance. She responds by developing a scheme to resell luxury handbags with a homeless con-artist, known throughout as “Trenchcoat”.
