ن انوي– ة نيثأ Athens – Greece

This is how Nadhir Zuʿbi’s 2016 fantasy novel Yuru (Euro) begins, a novel that contains two consecutive narratives that take place in the same speculative world. The first narrative is written from the perspective of a Greek Euro coin named Euro and the second from the perspective of a young man who begins to consume metal, gradually turns into steel, and abandons his human relations to join the parallel society that Euro inhabits. In this first section of the novel, Euro (who is gendered male) recounts his earliest memories and awakening to awareness. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, the process of expanding his self-awareness unfolds in relation to the category of the human. In the section above, Euro likens the moment when he produces his first ringing sound to the sound of a new-born baby’s cry. Similarities between the coins and humans abound; for instance, the capacity of voicing emotion and communicating histories, stories and ideas is as central to the lives of coins as it is to the humans around them. Indeed, storytelling is what the coins of the novel do as they gather in constantly changing group formations: in pockets, wallets, banks and vending machines. But Euro and his shifting coin communities also marvel at what sets humans apart from them. In this first chapter Euro recalls: ‘I remember when I saw a human being run for the first time. I laughed really hard because I didn’t understand what he was doing. However, with time, I learned that this was the way that humans roll.