The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan wasn’t on my radar at all to start 2024, as I’m not particularly enthralled by Gothic stylings, but an extremely strong review from someone who loved my favorite books of the year and the intrigue of a split timeline got my attention and convinced me to give it a try. 

One of those two timelines is set in the 21st century, in a crumbling estate on the coast of South Africa that has been converted to apartments and has attracted quite an assortment of tenants dealing with various forms of loss—including the lead, having moved with her father and the ghost of her sister in hopes of finding home after the death of her mother. The other timeline is set a hundred years prior, a barely speculative period drama starring the proud Indian immigrants who built the estate and brought about its downfall. 

After a prologue set in the earlier time, the entirety of Part One—covering nearly a third of the book—was set in the present, and I found it very difficult to immerse. I won’t necessarily warn others off here, because responses to prose are highly idiosyncratic, but the first stage of the book is interested mostly in setting the scene and establishing characters, told in a style surely meant to be lush and evocative but that left me feeling as though I were drowning in similes. None of the characters were especially compelling, the house was established merely as mildly haunted, and I found the book enough of a slog that I considered dropping it in the first third. 

But I didn’t want to drop it without seeing how it handled the older timeline, so I pressed on to part two, which totally reversed my criticisms. After nearly a hundred pages of reading feeling like a chore, I immersed effortlessly into the older timeline story, a family drama that feels more like a soap opera than anything I normally read but one that was impossible to put down. None of the pieces—a controlling mother-in-law, an impulsive husband long on extravagant dreams and short on self-awareness, a rivalry between two wives from different social classes—are anything new, but skilled storytelling made for a deeply compelling read, with the prologue offering enough hints of future tragedy to keep the tension sky-high, but without revealing so much that the ultimate climax would lose its shocking nature. The whole timeline is just a tremendous read, even though there’s little speculative element beyond the titular djinn impotently watching the proceedings.

And the excellent past storyline makes the present story better. Part of that is just getting into the flow of the story—immersion in one storyline makes it easier to get into a reading rhythm and immerse in another storyline. But another big part is that the stories simply become more connected as the lead in the 21st century timeline begins to dig into the history of the house and learns more and more about the very story the reader is being told in the past timeline sections, both informing the way she thinks about the present and literally connecting the plot at a couple points (most obviously, in the actions of the waiting djinn). 

While the book tries to deliver a true arc for every major character, it only spends a couple hundred pages in the 21st century story, with one character taking the lion’s share of the perspective. This leads to some of the secondary characters feeling underexplored, even as others become genuinely compelling figures. Even the lead’s story is something of a mixed bag, as the book explores her complicated relationships with three different family members, plus the estate-turned-apartment that serves as the focus of much of the book. In the end, some of it resonates quite well, and some of it really doesn’t. But even if her story remains imperfect in the final two sections, it becomes interesting in a way that it hadn’t in the book’s opening segment, ultimately making for a compelling read. 

Overall, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years has plenty of strengths and some noticeable weaknesses, with a very slow start despite its trim length and a 21st century timeline that offers a few highlights and a few plotlines that simply fizzle out. But the period drama lurking in the book’s 20th century timeline is tense and beautiful, elevating an uneven book to one that’s well worth reading. 

Recommended if you like: period romantic tragedies, lots of broken people living in a haunted house. 

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Multi-POV, and is also Published in 2024 by a POC Author, has a Character With a Disability, a Prologue or Epilogue, and Features Dreams. 

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.