The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

1. Palestinian American women -- Fiction.; 2. Palestinian Arabs -- Fiction.; 3. Teachers -- Fiction.; 4. Swindlers and swindling -- Fiction.; 5. Obsession in women -- Fiction.; 6. Mental health -- Fiction.; 7. New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction.; 8. Psychological fiction.; 9. Palestinian fiction.;