No God but Us

Bobuq Sayed is an Afghan cultural worker whose writing explores themes of migration, Islam and queer sexuality. They are the author of A Brief History of Australian Terror, a chapbook of essays, and the co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices from Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. A 2022–23 Steinbeck fellow at San José State University, a Lambda Literary scholar, and an award-winning James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami’s MFA programme in creative writing, Sayed lives in Brooklyn, New York. No God but Us is their first novel.

‘Vibrant, hilarious, and sharply critical, presenting a rich and real set of characters reeling across the world.’ — Mizna‘[An] impressive debut … Sayed skillfully balances the personal with the political.’ — Publishers Weekly‘Deeply felt and irreverent, No God but Us asks what might happen to one’s consciousness when mangled by the forces of empire. At its heart, this is a novel about family—chosen and not—and I am lucky to count this story among my literary kin.’ — Aria Aber, author of Good Girl‘Extraordinarily moving, astute, and often very funny, No God but Us is an exhilarating debut from a writer whose work I’ll always want to read.’ — R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit and The Incendiaries‘Bobuq Sayed moves between voices and continents with rare confidence, tracing how exile and desire shape who we become. This is a story alive to contradiction—ferocious in its longing, unsparing in its honesty, and deeply attuned to the ways love and belief survive their own undoing.’ — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside‘No God but Us explores the bonds we create and destroy around love, desire, country, and community with startling honesty, boldly interrogating the sacrifices one must make to live according to the truth of the human heart. A simply dazzling and unforgettable debut.’ — Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country and The Faraway World‘Impish yet deadly serious, No God but Us is a tessellation of borders and longings, love and danger—a novel that stays in the body long after its final page has turned.’ — Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different‘In a powerful debut, Bobuq Sayed reveals how forces of rejection from state and family meet the alchemy of attraction, desire, and belonging … A new kind of novel, with vast geographies of nation and heart.’ — Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity‘No God but Us moves beyond the family’s carbon-copy dedication to the state and ultimately returns us, with impressive grace and compassion, to one of fiction’s central concerns: our attempts to imagine formative change against the banal expectations of power.’ — Joseph Earl Thomas, author of Sink and God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer‘A polyphonic dream of a novel, spanning borders, language, and time, with rich, lyrical prose that brings to life the harrowing journeys of its protagonists. Sayed beautifully captures the pains of dislocation and hierarchy, gifting us with a work that has been sorely missing from the queer and literary canons.’ — Alejandro Varela, author of Middle Spoon and The Town of Babylon