But don't take it from them! Take it from us: Harun's writing is mesmerizing. In the excerpt she shares this week, a plane carries a new arrival into London, an alien land he approaches with the refined dread of a nightmare-haunted childhood. Her sentences are direct, disarmingly so; she leads her readers into paragraphs where they wake, with some unease, to find they're no longer where they thought. Here's the opening to "A New Arrival":

Dawn breaks outside the oval windows and blinds them all. They are flying through the break of day, the actual point that separates the unstoppable day from cleaving night. Below them lies a heavy band of stratocumulus, like a line on a map separating one country from another. The country below us may be under siege, he thinks, but we will fly on unhindered. It has nothing to do with us.

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