The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Zaher, Yasmin. The Coin. Catapult, 2024.

Yasmin Zaher's novel The Coin is told from the first person point of view of the unnamed protagonist. Throughout the novel, Zaher uses the past and present tenses and subverts notions of linear time to enact the narrator's complex internal experience. For the sake of clarity, this guide relies on the present tense and a streamlined mode of explanation.

The narrator is a Palestinian woman who has recently moved to New York City. With the help of her friend and sometimes-boyfriend Sasha, she secures a teaching job at Franklin Middle School in Manhattan and gets an apartment in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. The narrator gradually settles into New York life. Over time, however, the narrator quickly becomes disgusted by this alleged metropolitan dream. The city is filthy and disorderly and the narrator feels constantly anxious.

To combat her internal unrest, the narrator instates a new self-care regime she calls her CVS Retreats. She spends exorbitant amounts of money on household cleaning supplies and skincare products at CVS, brings them home, and spends her afternoons scrubbing the apartment and manicuring her body. She also drinks lemon water, hot water, and coffee to clean out her intestines and religiously dresses in designer clothes. She maintains these routines, convinced that she if she can look the part of the elegant, wealthy woman she can survive her new reality.

Then one day, the narrator spends her lunch break lying on the bathroom floor on her Burberry trench coat. On the way home, she leaves the coat in the bins outside her apartment, realizing how dirty it has gotten. A few days later, she runs into a man in the neighborhood wearing the coat. They strike up a conversation and soon start seeing each other regularly. Attached to Trenchcoat's glamour despite the fact that he has no income and no place to live, the narrator lets him move in with her. He also becomes financially dependent on her. The narrator does not mind because she finds him more exciting than Sasha. She casts off Sasha and spends all of her time with Trenchcoat when she is not teaching. However, she does feel disappointed when Trenchcoat will not have sex with her. She later discovers that he is gay, but still wishes they had a physical relationship.

Despite these complications, Trenchcoat seems to understand the narrator's growing anxiety. She recently decided that the coin she swallowed as a child must still be lodged in her body and causing her pain. When she tells Trenchcoat, he is sympathetic and suggests she accompany him to Paris to clear her head. Over the course of their time in Paris, the narrator becomes increasingly frustrated with Trenchcoat. He suddenly does not seem as glamorous or fun.

Not long after returning to New York, the narrator attends a gala with Sasha. They are not dating anymore, but they do have a sexual encounter afterwards. The next weekend, the two also take a trip upstate together. While here, the narrator starts thinking about her late parents, who died in a car accident when she was a child. She spends her time outdoors, reveling in the quiet and the air.

Back in New York, the narrator stops speaking to Sasha and Trenchcoat. She calls out of work and holes up in her apartment, gradually turning the space into an indoor garden meant to resemble the natural world. She spends several weeks rolling around in the dirt naked. In this state of reverie, the narrator lets herself remember her past. She also reconciles with where she is from and what she has lived through. She realizes that the coin will be inside of her forever and that that is okay.