The City of Brass

The City of Brass, the American author S. A. Chakraborty's fantasy novel, appeared in 2017, drawing on Middle Eastern folklore. It opens The Daevabad Trilogy; its sequels, The Kingdom of Copper and The Empire of Gold, followed in 2019 and 2020. The story begins in eighteenth-century Cairo.

Nahri survives there by passing as a healer, swindling Ottoman nobles with palm reading and sleight of hand, and she has just enough real talent to be dangerous and no idea where it came from. During an exorcism she accidentally summons a djinn warrior named Darayavahoush e-Afshin, known as Dara, who tells her that the magic in her blood belongs to a people she has never heard of and that the things hunting her will not stop.

Dara takes her to Daevabad, a city of brass and the capital of the daeva, where six tribes have kept an uneasy peace under a king who does not want a human-raised girl with that much power inside his walls. The city is divided by tribe, by history and by the terms on which the peace was made, and Nahri arrives with no standing in any of it. Her arrival disturbs an arrangement that several parties have an interest in preserving.

The trilogy continues with the two later volumes, and the first book establishes Nahri, Dara, the city and the tribes. It is a fantasy series with a political rather than a quest-shaped plot, and it is told from a small number of viewpoints on different sides of the same city.