Zain Khalid & Leila Mottley: A Conversation

Zain Khalid has written for TV and has been published in The New Yorker, The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Brother Alive (Grove Press) is his first novel. In 1990, three boys unrelated but intertwined by circumstance – Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef – are adopted as infants and share a bedroom atop a mosque in Staten Island, New York. They are inseparable, and conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef is indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers, except for one secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend he calls Brother. Brother persists as a companion into Youssef’s adult life, supporting him but also shaking his grip on the world. The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, has secrets, too, including the cause of his failing health and what happened to the boys’ biological parents. When the Imam returns to Saudi Arabia, the brothers, now adults, will be forced to follow. They find an opulent, almost futuristic world. Should they change who they are to survive or defend their deeply held beliefs?