In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor's office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.Unbeknownst to them, they are all the descendants of the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as jinns, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal of reason. Together, they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.Once the line between the worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia's children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark, spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, where beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease and a noise may contain a hidden curse.