So about two years ago, having just completed The Butterfly Mosque, I sat down to write a novel. I was deep into a wonderfully clarifying kind of rage.

The rage had been a long time coming. By this point, I’d spent years being frustrated by two things: one, the fact that I was so often forced to speak to my three primary audiences (comic book geeks, literary NPR types, and Muslims) separately. There were things I could talk about to Muslims that most non-Muslims wouldn’t understand; things I could say to fellow geeks that many of my coreligionists would find shocking; and sociopolitical shop talk in which I take a perverse delight, but which people who don’t consume the Sunday edition of the New York Times on a weekly basis would probably be bored to death by. Yes, I just ended a sentence in a preposition, and I am too lazy to fix it. Anyway.

The second thing was the mainstream media’s insistence that blogging and social media were no big deal and politically would amount to nothing, especially in the developing world. The global Gen Why was made up of texting slackers with no social consciousness, or so the official story went. By 2010, anybody who spent time on the internet knew that this was, if you will pardon me, total bullshit, and that Facebook, WordPress and Blackberry had provided a petri dish for a seething new epidemic of social change, particularly in the Middle East. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime was already wise to this, and had been in the business of arresting hacktivists for several years. But here in the US, I couldn’t get anybody to listen. Anybody. When I tried to explain to one very bright individual in the publishing industry why the internet was such a unique medium for conversation, his response was “I don’t understand why they can’t just pick up the phone and call each other.”

And so was born the rage. Anger is not always bad. Hatred and malice are always bad, but sometimes anger is the pure and determined light that shows you the way forward–not unlike joy. At least, this is what I think I learned from Les Miserables.

Out of the rage tumbled a story. If I couldn’t talk about the amazing things that were happening online in nonfiction, I would do it in fiction. And I wouldn’t stop there. I would draw in the pop culture I loved and the politics I found interesting and the literary influences that are part of who I am as a writer. I would write in my own inner voice, which does not distinguish between audiences, and hope that when those audiences finally got their hands on the finished product, they would see pieces of themselves in characters and situations they did not expect.

The result was Alif the Unseen. The titular character is a hacktivist in an unnamed emirate who battles shadowy, oppressive state security forces using methods both digital and arcane. (There are jinn involved, and ancient texts that are supposed to be hoaxes but aren’t. And at least one car chase.) While I was writing, even I thought I was maybe overdoing it just a little, and assigning too much importance to hackers and internet junkies in the Middle East. But I was fresh off a visit to Cairo, where a group of guys I’d met through Twitter organized a signing for me at a bookstore that was packed to the gills. We talked about comics and politics and the media, and I walked away with my heart pounding, thinking “this is really going to work.” I wasn’t even sure what “this” was.

Five months later, those same kids were overthrowing the government. I finished Alif the Unseen just as Mubarak left office, Tunisia was under new management, and uprisings had begun in Libya and Syria, in what would come to be called the Arab Spring.

Alif is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It comes out on July 3 from Grove/Atlantic Press. I encourage you to pre-order it from Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore (call and ask them to reserve your copy). Tell your friends. Tell your friends’ friends. Know that with each person you tell about Alif, I am sending you silent but fervent thanks.

I thought the new book deserved a freshly freshed-up website. Hence the new digs. I’ve slacked off on the blogging in the last couple of years, but I plan to be back a lot more now, so watch this space. We will talk more anon.