Jinn in the Family. This item is unavailable.Jinn in the Family

Jinn in the Family

Shortlisted for the 2026 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the 2026 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

When a Western-trained psychologist returns to Zanzibar, the stories he once dismissed as superstition rise up to meet him-alive, layered, and rooted in blood.

Raised in Canada and shaped by science, he believed identity was a matter of will. But in the heat and hush of his ancestral island, whispers of jinn, witches, and family secrets begin to unearth a deeper truth-one shaped by exile, memory, inheritance, and spirits that do not forget.

Moving between modern-day Zanzibar and stories reaching back through generations, Jinn in the Family is Zanzibar Gothic-a blend of literary fiction, supernatural horror, and cultural mythology that weaves Arab, African, and Indian lineages into a haunting story of family, inheritance, and belonging.

At once intimate and otherworldly, the novel explores what can be lost when diasporic people become separated from culture, history, and the unseen-and what might be reclaimed when they begin to listen to what was never truly gone.

More than folklore. More than horror. This is a story of what lives in the quiet, what passes from one generation to another, and what refuses to die.

Dr. R. Y. Abdulrehman, bestselling author of Developing Anti-Racist Cultural Competence, is a clinical and consulting psychologist whose work explores identity, culture, and social justice. He is co-author of Movies, Miniseries, and Multiculturalism and Editor-in-Chief of The Poetry of Angry Black and Brown People. His TEDx talk, podcast Different People, and recognition by the Society of Consulting Psychology highlight his impact on equity and inclusion. Born to a Zanzibari family, his ancestral storytelling inspired Jinn in the Family, his first poetic novel.