It’s hard to imagine a debut more thrilling than Youssef Rakha’s groundbreaking ‘The Book of the Sultan’s Seal’. The novel is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Çorbaci, takes around greater Cairo post-9/11. In a series of visions, Çorbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and embarks on a mission the sultan assigns him. Çorbaci’s trials shed light on the contemporary Arab Muslim’s desperation for a sense of identity: ‘The Book of the Sultan’s Seal’ is both a suspenseful, erotic, riotous novel and an urgent, unparalleled examination of accounts of Muslim demise