The Djinn's Apprentice

The steppe did not care that his father was dead.

Fourteen-year-old Ayoub Khelifi walks the Algerian steppe every afternoon, talking to a father who can no longer answer. He walks past the alfa grass and the esparto fields and the silence that has replaced everything his father used to say. One evening, something answers back.

The voice belongs to a djinn - ancient, patient, and bound to the landscape by laws older than Islam. It offers Ayoub not wishes but something far more dangerous: an apprenticeship. A way of seeing the world as it truly is - layered, alive, and full of creatures that humanity has forgotten how to notice.

With his sardonic younger sister Amina and a reluctant grandmother who knows more than she admits, Ayoub begins an education that takes him from the steppe of M'sila through the hidden landscapes of Algeria - into places where the seen and unseen worlds overlap, where grief becomes a kind of sight, and where the line between teacher and student is never what it seems.

But the djinn has its own reasons for choosing a grieving boy. And the education it offers will cost Ayoub more than he understands.

Not all teachers are human. Not all lessons are safe.