The Mulai
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The Mulai
Pre-order Now for £14.39
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Narrated by:
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Jot Davies
Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines life on another planet.
An archeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community: a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth.
Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archeologist records his attempts to understand their world–a strange negative of our own–questions of translation, meaning-making, and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore.
Drawing on Borges, Le Guin, and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.
©2023 Munir Hachemi (P)2026 Coach House BooksCritic reviews
'[S]tartling, hopeful, speculative ... a daring novel narrated in strange and twisting language.'–Michelle Schingler, Foreword Reviews ★ STARRED REVIEW
“This book [has] a beating heart alongside its intellectual pursuits. A heady examination of a culture at once familiar and alien.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Sanches [and] Hachemi frame reading, and writing, as a source of delight—an active, anxious and deeply transformative ritual of connection. It is a hopeful vision of what literature can look like.”—Saba Ahmed, The New Statesman