About My Novel, The Skin and Its Girl, winner of the 2024 Barbara Gittings Literature Award
“Imaginative, bold, and vividly drawn, Cypher’s tale of exile, inheritance, and the healing power of love will crack you open.”
Now in Paperback
Available in hardcover, audio, & e-book
A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.
In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's every known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the U.S. But as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.
The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and even wield the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.
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“Beautifully detailed as a piece of Palestinian embroidery, this bold, vivid novel will speak to readers across genders, cultures, and identities. Sarah Cypher weaves a brilliant tale of family, magic, and enduring legacy—a must-read.”
“The Skin and Its Girl is a thrilling ode to the power of storytelling, to a story’s ability to illuminate and conceal, to preserve and destroy. ... I loved falling under the spell of Sarah Cypher’s hypnotic debut.”
Short Stories
“Brood”
Published online November 6, 2023 in Rowayat Issue #7: Joy. Read it here.
“Abu Hani’s Middle Eastern Foods and Gifts”
Read about the story on my website here.
“Ghost Town”
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, anthologized for educators in the open-access online textbook, Elements of Creative Writing, Chapter 7.
Essays
Why I’m Using My PEN Nomination to Protest for Palestine
“The silence of our institutions stands on 75 years of inertia.” Published online April 13, 2024, in Lithub.
7 Arab and Arab Diasporic Novels about Storytellers
Stories that counter-colonize the Western narrative and reclaim cultural agency (Electric Literature, May 30, 2023)
Feral, Beautiful and Free
On a cliff above the Mediterranean, another Antalya cat watches sunlight touch the eastern slopes. She’s a dusty old queen perched a hundred feet above blue water, overlooking the sunrise on the Taurus Mountains…
8 Books that Use Direct Address Storytelling
Instead of a jolt, direct-address writing delivers a subtler charge, like opening someone else’s mail or overhearing one end of an emotionally raw monologue…
A Feral Year: The Novel Beyond the End of Communication
“I have always kept ducks,” says a character in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, “even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answers to the questions that are on my mind.”
Essay on Brood X
“Having spent a lifetime in my own soft-voiced and nondescript body, I linger over the cicada’s deafening song. What if the loudest art comes from being nearly empty? A common scream of love, until we die?” (Majuscule Literary Journal, 2020)