Zohra Nabi
About Author
Zohra Nabi grew up inventing stories for her two younger sisters. She studied law at Cambridge and Oxford universities, but secretly dreamed of being an author. Now she lives in London, browsing bookshops and writing magical adventures.
Interview
The City Beyond the Stars (Simon & Schuster Children's Books)
April 2024
In Zohra Nabi's sweeping fantasy adventure, The City Beyond the Stars, we travel through strange and magical landscapes with Yara and her friends, as they seek to put right the wrongs of their society; to bring back the magic that has been lost to its world, and help who are in exile to return home.
Author Zohra Nabi joins ReadingZone to tell us about her magical new fantasy, The City Beyond the Stars, which follows on from her debut, The Kingdom Over the Sea.
Q&A with Zohra Nabi
"The stories we tell ourselves can have so much power, and change the way
we move through the world."
1. Can you tell us a little about yourself, how you became a writer, and your pet loves and loathings?
I love writing. I've always been a terrible sleeper, and when I was younger I was allowed to stay up if I was reading - and when I was a teenager that turned into staying up to write. Quite a few of the ideas I came up with during those late-night writing sessions made it into The Kingdom over the Sea!
When I went to university I studied law, but I secretly hoped I would be able to make it as a writer one day. I graduated into lockdown, and decided I would use the money I had saved up from a legal essay competition to do an online creative writing course. Everything escalated from there - I wrote my book on the course, signed with my agent and then sold the two books to my publisher, all in the space of a year!
My pet loves are music, cooking for friends and cryptic crosswords. My pet loathings are overusing similes, losing at board games, and rowing machines.
2. What happens in your books, The Kingdom Over the Sea and the follow-up, The City Beyond the Stars?
The Kingdom over the Sea follows the story of Yara Sulimayah, a twelve-year-old girl who came to our world as a baby, and who has grown up in Bournemouth ignorant of where she and her mother came from. After her mother's death, she finds a letter telling her to go right to the end of the harbour and read out a poem that will take her to the city of Zehaira - a city that can't be found on any map. Once there, she is instructed to seek out a sorceress, Leyla Khatoun. So, Yara embarks on a journey through a land of sorcerers and alchemists, where she must find her community and learn the secrets of her past.
The City Beyond the Stars picks up where The Kingdom over the Sea left off - Yara has found her magical settlement of sorcerers, and longs to return to the City of Zehaira to save someone she loves from the alchemists' clutches. Instead, after receiving a mysterious message, she travels further into the kingdom in search of a new, powerful magic - a magic based in storytelling. Her journey takes her to an abandoned observatory and to the ruins of an ancient city, and Yara must confront family secrets and the history of sorcery itself in order to save her people.
"I wanted to write a magical adventure story in my own way, and thinking about my own family history was essential for that.
Imagining magic as a culture that had been almost destroyed by oppressors, and in some ways lost forever."
3. What inspired these stories about storytelling, magic and family?
I've always loved children's fantasy stories, particularly those where the magic has some basis in words or books. There's something lovely about the thought that speaking the right words in the right order could make something wonderful or terrible happen.
But I knew I wanted to write a magical adventure story in my own way, and thinking about my own family history was essential for that. Imagining magic as a culture that had been almost destroyed by oppressors, and in some ways lost forever - and having a heroine determined to learn as much as she can and save magic from destruction - gave the story of The Kingdom over the Sea the momentum it needed.
Similarly for The City Beyond the Stars, I wanted to explore that idea even further, by asking how far we should go in attempting to recover our lost culture and history. I wanted to explore how important it is to deal with the things that have happened in the past, either to our families or to society in general.
4. Who are the children at the heart of this story, and what magical abilities do they have? Did anyone help inspire Yara's character?
The three principle children at the heart of the story are Yara, Rafi and Mehnoor. Yara is our protagonist, and is our entry point into the world, as someone who grew up in the UK. She is stubborn and determined to get to the truth, and she is fiercely loyal to her family and friends. She's also someone who, as a result of growing up in our world, has always devoted herself passionately to causes and to social justice, and she hates the inequality that she sees in Zehaira. I think that marks her out more than any magical powers she has!
By contrast, Rafi very much belongs to the magical elite of this world, and his drive comes from a desire to see the sorcerers reinstated to their former prominence. He's a particularly good medic, something that's frowned upon by his remaining family, and it's his friends who give him the courage to pursue his interests.
Finally Mehnoor is a very gentle, dreamy child - she is a soothsayer, and grew up in the attic of a bakery, kept hidden by her aunt. She is devoted to her friends, but has to learn over the course of the books to stand up for what she thinks is the right thing to do.
Yara's character was definitely inspired by my two younger sisters - she's a real combination of the two of them. They have a similar determination and stubbornness, and very strong convictions. When I was first devising Yara's character, it was the pandemic, and the three of us were scattered across the UK. When I wrote about Yara it was almost like I had them back with me.
5. Have any places or stories helped inspire the magical world, Zehaira, which is at the heart of this story? How did this world develop and grow?
Zehaira was very inspired by the cities of the golden age of the Islamic world - these places of incredible learning and scholarship, where there were incredible discoveries being made, and libraries being built and poetry being written. I wanted to create a brand new city that could nonetheless stand alongside these places.
It really grew through research - I read a lot of history books and articles, as well as several texts written by authors who lived through that period. I was also very inspired by the tales of the 1001 nights, as well as a strange collection of folktales: 'Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange'.
I really try and read as much as possible before I start writing, so that the world feels richly textured to the reader, as though they could walk around in it themselves! But there are places in the kingdom - such as the settlement Yara travels to in a mountain valley - which come from my own imagination, and my attempts to recreate childhood memories, or details from family stories.
"I've always been fascinated by stories, and our desire to turn the things that have happened to us into a narrative.
The human capacity for storytelling is so wonderful."
6. Can you tell us a little about how you explore the power of storytelling in the novel, and your own thoughts on how stories can help to shape the world and drive the imagination?
In The City Beyond the Stars, storytelling is initially something that is dismissed by the sorcerers - the stories of Rawiya and Naazima are frequently referred to as 'only folk tales'. However, we come to learn that magic based in storytelling holds unprecedented power - it gives the user the ability to transform the past, and the present along with it. It's also a force of destabilisation, with a real threat that using it may cause the world to come apart at the seams.
I've always been fascinated by stories, and our desire to turn the things that have happened to us into a narrative. The human capacity for storytelling is so wonderful - the ability to turn pain and suffering into beautiful art, to find humour and pathos in the things that happen to us in the everyday. But it's also something where we have to be so careful - so as not to ignore facts when they don't fit the story we want, or to become obsessed with fitting events into a certain narrative arc.
The stories we tell ourselves can have so much power, and change the way we move through the world. We have a responsibility to be as honest and considerate in our storytelling as we can be.
7. Other than a great adventure story, what would you like your readers to take from Yara and her friends' adventures?
I think I would like readers to think about all the migration that happens across the two books - all the characters who are displaced, and who move between cities and kingdoms and even worlds. How anyone can find themselves in a position where they have to leave their home, how it's something that can happen for any reason, and that the movement of people this way is one of the most natural things in the world.
That being said, I don't want readers to think that people should just accept the terrible things that are inflicted on them. The sorcerers of Zehaira are displaced, and it was important to me that they should fight back against the people who drove them out, and seek out justice for what was done to them.
8. If you could visit your world of Zehaira, where would you most want to visit, and what magical object would you bring back?
I would love to visit the Great Library - I am a huge fan of libraries and love the idea of reading all those books on magic! I would definitely try and bring back a flying carpet, I would so love to be able to fly anywhere in the world that I chose.
"I love the feeling of losing myself in a brand new world, and feeling as though
I've been transported somewhere different."
9. Do you have any plans to return to Zehaira with more stories? What are you writing currently?
I would love to return to Zehaira in the future! I know there's so much more of the world to explore, I just have to find the right protagonist to take us there…but I think it would be quite a way in the future for me. I have lots of different ideas - and I'm currently working on something secret but so exciting and interesting that it's taking up all my writing headspace.
10. What are your escapes from everyday life, and what kinds of stories weave their spell on you?
It's funny, it really doesn't feel like that long ago that writing was my escape from everyday life! But now I love escaping by listening to a piece of music, or cooking - something absorbing, but where I can daydream as much as I want. But my main escapes from everyday life are good stories - whether that's a good book, or a TV show or film.
I love the feeling of losing myself in a brand new world, and feeling as though I've been transported somewhere different. But that can be from any kind of story - a good romantic comedy, a weird novel told in fragments of stories, a history book…but of course I have a particular weakness for children's fantasy and adventure stories. I love the writing of authors like Diana Wynne Jones, Joan Aiken and Eva Ibbotson.
The City Beyond the Stars
The Kingdom Over the Sea: The perfect spellbinding fantasy adventure for holiday reading
