Brother Alive

Zain Khalid

An astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality and capitalist systems of control.

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom above a mosque in Staten Island.

The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known for his radical sermons extolling the virtues of opting out of Western ideologies. He has his own secrets, including the truth about what happened to the boys’ parents.

With stylistic brilliance and intellectual acuity, in Brother Alive Zain Khalid brings characters to vivid life with a bold energy that matches the great themes of his novel – family, capital, power, sexuality, and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

‘Beguiling... a searing collage of the profound and the mundane.’ New York Times

‘This wildly ambitious novel seeks to break new ground in big-issue territory like provenance, race, class, birth and rebirth... that it succeeds in some of its lofty aspirations is impressive.’

Big Issue

Zain Khalid has been published in the New Yorker, the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. He has also written for television. Brother Alive is his first novel. He lives in New York City.