UNKNOWN

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

Jinn in the Family

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 and witches begin to unearth a deeper truth; one carved by exile, memory, and spirits that do not forget.

Told in two intertwined timelines, "modernity" and "antiquity", Jinn in the Family blends poetic fiction with cultural myth, weaving Arab, African, and Indian lineages into a haunting tapestry of inheritance. This novel asks what is lost when diasporic people abandon identity and the unseen, and what might be reclaimed when we finally listen to what was never gone.

More than folklore. More than horror. This is the story of what lives in the quiet, 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.