The Jasad Heir
The Jasad Heir
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Sara Hashem on The Jasad Heir
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The certainty that turned out to be wrongThe book’s preoccupation with truth has a precise origin point: the moment Hashem discovered that her father’s confidence about Egypt’s global visibility was completely unfounded. She had left the country in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, carrying her father’s assurance that the world was watching. What she found in California shook something loose in her understanding of how knowledge travels, and how little.
Part of the inspiration came from a comment my father made when my family was preparing to leave Egypt the year following the events of the 2011 revolution. I had asked him if he thought people would know about what had happened here. His response, approximately translated: ‘They will know even the movements of the ants in Egypt.’ So when I returned to the US and found out that actually, absolutely no one knew anything about what had happened, I was shaken. Not by their lack of knowledge, but by how certain my own had been.
That reckoning with certainty fed directly into what the novel is structurally about. The gap between what Hashem expected the world to know and what it actually knew became a template for the book’s central question.
Truth is an amorphous and critical concept in The Jasad Heir. Certain foundational truths build the backbone of these characters, whether they seek it out or suppress it, and I wanted to explore what it would be like if those foundational truths began to crack.
Beyond the political shock of the revolution, Hashem carried a quieter, more personal burden back to California: the guilt of having left. She spent roughly a year and a half feeling she had abandoned a place at its moment of crisis, and she did not let that guilt go to waste. She routed it into her protagonist, Sylvia, the exiled heir of Jasad, a destroyed magic kingdom, who has spent years estranged from both her people and her own history.
She doesn’t really know much about her home kingdom...and grapples with what do you owe to a place and a people that you barely know but without whom you wouldn’t exist. [paraphrased from audio]
The question Sylvia is forced to answer across the novel is the question Hashem was living.
Hashem also had a specific Egyptian-American reader in mind, one for whom fantasy set in a vaguely ‘ancient’ Middle East is more exhausting than affirming. Her commitment was to the Egypt she and that reader actually know, not the Egypt that shows up in Western tourist imagination.
When people think Egypt, they usually think the pyramids, and the pharaohs, and all of that. But I mean Egypt as it is now. And that was something I was really committed to: The Jasad Heir would have aspects of Egypt as I know it, as other Egyptians who grew up in America with the same background as me, who learned everything they know from their parents, or from visits, or from stories, or from shows, would be able to recognize the same things in the book. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Magic first, then everything elseHashem’s world-building method is unusually systematic: she builds outward from the magic system before she builds anything else, because in her framework the magic determines the politics. In The Jasad Heir, Jasad is the only one of four kingdoms that retained magic after a cataclysm; every alliance and betrayal in the story follows from that single premise. She had to understand the logic of that distribution before she could write a single scene.
Much of the mythology and magic come from the stories I was told by family and classmates in Egypt! For instance, nisnas is another word for monkey in Arabic, which came as a shock to me (the word I knew was ‘ird’) and allowed my seventh-grade classmates to tell the hapless new student grand stories of the fearsome nisnas. My parents laughed themselves hoarse when I came home panicking about the nisnas coming to get us, but I never forgot the tales of the not-monkey.
The nisnas, which appears in the book as one of its stranger creatures, is the product of years of accumulated stories that varied by region: Alexandria had its version; her father’s village had another.
The choice to split the point of view between two characters required a formal asymmetry. Sylvia, the protagonist, narrates in first person throughout both books. Arin, her antagonist-turned-ally, gets third person in alternating chapters. Hashem explains the decision in terms of what she wanted each structure to protect.
I want there to be a little bit of a mystery. I don’t want to know exactly what he’s thinking. [paraphrased from audio]
Keeping Sylvia in first person made the emotional journey entirely hers. Keeping Arin in third kept him at a distance the reader has to work to close.
Arin’s hyper-analytical way of moving through the world did not come from another fantasy novel. Hashem was a first-year law student when she drafted the book, and the way she describes building Arin’s reasoning mirrors exactly how she was being trained to read a legal problem.
What’s the rule, the rule statement? What’s the issue? And then how am I solving it? [paraphrased from audio]
The hardest revision problem was not structure or mythology: it was Sylvia’s moral texture. An earlier version of the character had been built, unconsciously, on what Hashem came to call a law of balance: any selfish or dark choice Sylvia made had to be paid for with guilt. The result was a protagonist who never actually owned herself.
By trying to make the initial version of Sylvia palatable, I had accidentally made her insufferable. This Sylvia didn’t take ownership of her selfishness, she excused it.
Fight scenes are where Hashem’s process breaks down most visibly, and she has made a kind of peace with that. The problem is structural: every fight in the book demands a completely different approach depending on whose interiority she is writing from. Sylvia fights as raw, explosive energy; Arin fights with the precision of someone working through a proof. Neither approach transfers to the other, and the scenes that cannot be salvaged go somewhere specific.
A lot of my fight scenes die. They die in the graveyard. [paraphrased from audio]
Her way through is to ask what the fight reveals about the character’s emotional state, not only what it depicts physically.
On craft choices
Likeability as the wrong questionHaving revised away the apologetic version of Sylvia, Hashem wrote a full description of who the character actually is in the published book. The catalogue reads less like a pitch and more like a warning to readers who expect a heroine to perform contrition.
Let me introduce you to the real Sylvia of Jasad: she’s a temperamental, paranoid crook who’s terrible at keeping plants alive, and five years of surviving unspeakable torture by a disgraced war captain has caused Sylvia to distrust both her magic and her scorched throne. She’ll fake struggling to carry heavy objects so she doesn’t give away that she can kill you with one hand, she eats a tooth-rotting volume of sesame seed candies, and if you put her in a situation where she feels trapped, she’ll become utterly unhinged.
The enemies-to-lovers structure of Sylvia and Arin’s relationship was not a genre convention Hashem stumbled into. She chose it because the version she finds satisfying requires that both characters have genuinely good reasons to despise each other. The slow erosion of that enmity only works if the enmity was real.
I adore enemies-to-lovers, especially when the characters start off as true enemies with valid, powerful reasons to loathe one another. It makes the slow shift of the earth beneath the unwitting characters’ feet bringing them closer together all the more satisfying.
The likeability question for female protagonists is one Hashem has thought about carefully, and she rejects the premise that likeability is the right standard. Her guest post for Fantasy Book Café is addressed to readers who might resist Sylvia, and it proposes a different set of questions entirely.
Bravery, kindness, compassion: no two people express these qualities the exact same way, so why should likeability for a female character follow one rigid set of rules? Instead, I would ask: do you understand them? Does it make sense why they move through the world the way they do? And most importantly, do you want to stick around for the ride?
What she wants us to sit with
Belonging as a debt you didn’t ask forHashem names the book’s central concern in the plainest terms she uses anywhere in her public writing. It is not a fantasy novel about magic or politics at its root; it is a novel about the obligations that come with identity, and about what it means to be held by a place or a people.
At its core, The Jasad Heir is about belonging: how it influences the duties we owe to the places we’re from and the people we’re born to, who it tethers you to, and how it makes you brave.
The representation aim Hashem articulates for Arab-American readers is also a corrective. For a reader who has spent years watching their culture appear in genre fiction as a source of menace or spectacle, the goal Hashem set herself is not celebration but relief.
An Arab-American who picked up The Jasad Heir would be able to smile in recognition when they saw aspects of Egyptian culture, instead of dreading what came next.
When Hashem names the message she most wants a reader to carry out of the book, she ties it directly to Sylvia’s arc rather than to any geopolitical or cultural argument. Sylvia has made catastrophic choices to survive; the book is not interested in whether those choices were forgivable. It is interested in what she does next.
The message that I would really love readers to take away from The Jasad Heir is that it’s not about the choices you made then, it’s about the choices you make next. And what you have to offer is good enough. [paraphrased from audio]