It doesn’t take long to see that Maya Binyam has a unique voice, some exponentially rarer to find with each passing year. Her characters narration is alien, but not ignorant; ambiguous but not evasive. A refugee receives a phone call and is told to board a flight. He learns his story and purpose simultaneously with the reader, and Binyam’s masterful construction maintains this simultaneous and gradual enlightenment until the final pages. The novel encompasses so many emotions, and illustrates many of the major political problems facing our times, without ever naming them (the narrator uses no proper nouns; sounds annoying, I know, but it works), all within 200 pages. It’s an incredibly impressive novel, and it being Binyam’s debut is all the more impressive. I had named “The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut as my favorite novel of 2023, but now “Hangman” is right there with it. I could keep gushing, but it would be all too easy to spoil this book. Just go read it.