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I’m sure there are other contenders, but Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, about a Palestinian woman in New York City, feels to me like the buzzy book of the summer. And maybe the weight of expectation did it no good, because I found this to be a fairly run-of-the-mill story about a woman under pressure. Obsessed with the filth of the city and seemingly lacking any kind of emotional life, the narrator ‘works� at a private school for boys and strikes up a friendship with a homeless scammer. It’s all well-written, but I’ve read its like many times before, and it’s difficult to care about someone falling apart when they’re so rich that they’re insulated from consequence. The fact of its protagonist’s wealth makes The Coin virtually indistinguishable from the many stories of this type that already exist about affluent American women. Sure you can map certain anxieties attributed to nationality onto the character’s obsessions and actions, but honestly I think that’s a bit of a reach and not even what the book itself is going for � it’s ‘more of a New York novel than a Palestinian novel�.

Comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh absolutely stand up, though: themes of filth and cleanliness, the constant judging of others, the emotional vacuity... The Coin reminded me in particular of the Moshfegh story ‘Bettering Myself� (also about a highly incompetent teacher!), and it has some similarities to Jade Sharma’s Problems too (though I think that was a much better book).