The City of Brass
Fantasy, Low Fantasy
S.A. Chakraborty
The Daevabad Trilogy, Book # 1
Harper Voyager
November 14th 2017
eBook
569
English
March 18, 2020 March 25, 2020
Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.
But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass?a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.
In that city, behind gilded brass walls laced with enchantments, behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments are simmering. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, she learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.
After all, there is a reason they say be careful what you wish for.
About the book
Nahri, lives in Egypt in the 18th century and survives with thefts and scams against the wealthiest and French soldiers. In addition to this, she practices exorcisms and it is one of these that goes wrong and that makes the story begin. She also helps people to heal, because she is able to “feel” a disease, and learn languages easily. Above all, she speaks a language that she has never studied and which is not spoken in Egypt, so she believes to be the language of her ancestors. In fact, she is an orphan and doesn’t know her origins. One evening, after one of her exorcisms, the girl is attacked by an Ifrit who has taken possession of the girl to whom she has practised the exorcism. She is saved by Dara, who then reveals that she is the one who invoked him and that she is a “half human, half djinn” of an ancient family of healers now extinct. Dara explains why these Ifrits are trying to kill her and to protect her he must take her to the City of Brass.
