The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

Shannon Chakraborty is the New York Times bestselling author of the Daevabad Trilogy for which she was nominated for Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy and Crawford awards. She is also the author of a fourth volume of short stories that takes place in the same world as the Daevabad Trilogy. This trilogy is similar to Amina’s story in that the main protagonist is a disreputable female who is drawn into a magical world. Chakraborty’s love of medieval Middle Eastern history and mythology has a profound influence upon her work, and her series feature mythical Islamic creatures of many sorts, with djinns being a main source of both plot twists and character development throughout the Daevabad Trilogy. Her own conversion to Islam and her desire for the youth of her community to read about themselves helped to inspire the creation of Amina’s character and adventures.

The collision of civilizations stands as one of the many reoccurring themes in Chakraborty’s work, whether the civilizations in question are magical or human. As the stories’ rollicking pace progresses, the action is punctuated by conflicting cultures, powers, and in Amina’s case, ideas about lifestyle. All of these different conceptual frameworks vie for space or control in the lives and worlds of the author’s protagonists.