Katherine and I have been friends for a little while. I met her at an ill-fated book sale where we were both stationed behind tables on which our recently published books were stacked, and no one was buying.

You might call Hannah Lillith Assadi’s first novel, Sonora, a work of superstitious realism. Though the book’s events are grounded in reality and plausibility, its narrator, Ahlam, is a young woman of such elegiac, mystic perception that one comes away from her story as if awaking on a post-lysergic morning: memories feel slanted and opaque, scenes haunted and possibly dreamed.