Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous
Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in an isolated boardinghouse for misfits, seeking to forget their pasts and disappear into the mansions dark corridors.
Until Sana. She and her father are the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, seeking a new home after suffering painful loss. Unlike the others, who choose not to look too closely at the mansion’s unsettling qualities—the strange assortment of bones in the overgrown garden, the mysterious figure seen to move sometimes at night—she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion. To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades.
Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time, with faded photographs of a couple in love and a worn diary that whispers of a dark the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, the original owner’s second wife, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who once loved Meena and has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, awakening the memories of the house itself—and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil.
Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.
Review:The manor Akbar Manzil has been sitting and rotting, built over a hundred years ago, it stills plays host to a boarding house for misfits to forget their pasts and try to move forward with their lives but soon they disappear in the many grim passageways. Soon Sana and her father move into the manor but instead of leaving things be, she gets curious and decides to look into the sinister history of Akbar Manzil Manor.Sana finds a room long locked and forgotten. After poking around Sana discovers that the room belonged to a woman named Meena, the second wife to the original owner of the manor. Meena ended up dying a century ago under mystifying circumstances. Sana is preoccupied with Meena’s diary that she has found in the room, Sana doesn’t notice the Djinn that stalks her from the shadows.Sana digs up secrets that will forever change both the living and the dead at Akbar Manzil.The cover is what caught my attention, and I’m glad it did. The cover is beautiful, and making this review I just realized the shadow hands on her. It did take me quite some time to exactly get into the book though but after a few chapters I was invested in the story. I look forward to reading more from this author.Thank you to Viking and NetGalley for the e-arc, in exchange for my opinions.
