Excerpt from The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"How should I know?" I peek up at the counter to see what she's making—sfiha? I hope it's sfiha. I love the spiced lamb and pine nuts, the thin disks of dough crisp with oil.

"Mama." Huda comes in from the pantry, her rose-patterned headscarf streaked with flour, her arms heavy with jars of spices and bundles of herbs from the garden. She sets them down on the counter. "We're out of cumin."

"Again!" Mama throws up her hands, pink with the juice from the lamb. "And lazy Zahra, eh? She's helping me with the pies, or what?"

"Locked in her room, I bet." No one hears me. Zahra's been buried in her phone or holed up in the room she shares with Huda since we moved to Homs. Since Baba died, she's gotten mean, and now we're trapped with her. The little things that kept us going while Baba was sick are gone now—buying candy from the bodega, playing wall ball on the sides of buildings. Mama makes her maps, Zahra plays on her phone, and all I do is wait out these long, scorching days.

Zahra and Huda always talked about Syria like it was home. They knew it long before Manhattan, said it felt more real to them than Lexington Avenue or Eighty-Fifth Street. But this is my first time outside Amreeka—which is what they call it here—and all the Arabic I thought I knew doesn't add up to much. This doesn't feel like home to me.

"Find your sister." Mama's voice is edged with red again, a warning. "Tonight is special. We want everything ready for Abu Sayeed, don't we?"

That melts me, and I slink off to find Zahra. She's not in her and Huda's room. The pink walls sweat in the heat. Zahra's clothes and jewelry are all over her wrinkled comforter and the rug. I pick my way over crumpled jeans and tee shirts and a stray bra. I inspect a bottle of Zahra's perfume on the dresser. The glass bottle is a fat purple gem of a thing, like a see-through plum. I spray some on the back of my hand. It smells like rotten lilacs. I sneeze on Zahra's bra.

I tiptoe back down the hall, through the kitchen, and into the living room. My toes burrow into the red-and-beige Persian rug, upsetting Mama's careful vacuuming. A stereo blasts something that's supposed to be music: red guitar trills, the black splotches of snare drums. Zahra is stretched out on the low couch, tapping at her smartphone, her legs over the floral-printed arm. If Mama saw her with her feet on the cushions, she'd scream.

"Summer twenty-eleven," Zahra drawls through the heat. "I was supposed to graduate next year. Class of 2012. We planned out our road trip to Boston. It should have been the best year ever." She turns her face to the cushions. "Instead I'm here. It's a hundred and fifty degrees. We have no air conditioning and Mama's dumb dinner tonight."

She can't see me boring holes into her back with my eyes. Zahra's just jealous that Huda got to graduate high school before we left New York and she didn't. She doesn't seem to care at all how I feel, that it sucks just as much to lose your friends at twelve as it does at eighteen. I rap her back with my hand. "Your music is dumb, and it's not a hundred and fifty degrees. Mama wants you in the kitchen."

"Like hell." Zahra covers her eyes with her arm. Her black curls hang over the side of the couch, her stubborn eyes half-lidded. The gold bracelet on her wrist makes her look haughty and grown-up, like a rich lady.

"You're supposed to help with the pies." I tug on her arm. "Come on. It's too hot to keep pulling you."

"See, genius?" Zahra lurches up from the couch, taking lazy barefoot steps to shut the stereo off.

"We're out of cumin again." Huda comes in, wiping her hands on a rag. "Want to come?"

"Let's get ice cream." I wrap myself around Huda's waist. Zahra leans back on the arm of the couch.

Excerpted from The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Excerpted by permission of Touchstone. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.