Diary of a Djinn: A Novel

From the author of the highly praised memoir The Sun at Midday comes this witty and bewitching first novel. Diary of a Djinn takes the narrator and her alter ego, the playful and watchful djinn, on a series of adventures from the glamorous rigors of a Milan fashion house in the 1980s, where the narrator is a reluctant muse to the designer, to 1990s Manhattan. In a humorous flashback, she revisits the cloistered life of a Florentine boarding school filled with the daughters of blueboods and industrialists—a time of comic/catastrophic infatuations with improbable men. In New York, she finally meets Hare –perfect, as the djinn comments, “because he was not ‘free’…a way for her to get used to the idea that people are not possessions.” She is befriended by his mother, the indomitable octogenarian Princess who wears Givenchy and Courrèges, swears by Leopardi and Shakespeare, and believes that art should be left to geniuses but otherwise discouraged. In sickness and in health, as Diary of a Djinn reveals, the body is a magic bottle that can sometimes fall into the wrong hands, until the all-knowing djinn comes to the rescue. In Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff has given us a stunning and moving chronicle of the everyday mix of the tragic and the mundane, of elegance and frailty, but above all, love.