Jinn in the Family

Jinn in the FamilyShortlisted for the 2026 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the 2026 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book AwardWhen 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.