Bobuq Sayed, 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 program, is set to release their debut novel, No God But Us, on May 26. 2026. Set in Istanbul, Sayed’s novel follows Delbar, a queer Afghan man who recently moved from Washington, DC, with dreams of becoming a drag queen, and Mansur, a refugee who left behind his first love in Iran. The two are thrust together when riot police descend on attendees of the annual Istanbul Pride march.
No Gods But Us is available for pre-order from Harper and will be published on May 26, 2026.
Debutiful is honored to reveal No God But Us‘s cover, designed by Olivia McGiff with artwork from Iman Raad along with a Q&A with Sayed about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
So many ideas! There were some cliches I wanted to avoid, like old-world representations of Islam — steam swirling off a teacup, the stark minaret, mosaics, or prayer mats — which are sort of banal where they aren’t actively Orientalist. Instead, I wanted the cover to draw upon maximalist aesthetics that catch the eye and also overwhelm it. The vision was really to riff on anti-immigrant anxieties by showcasing this almost garish refusal to assimilate.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The idiom ‘a fox in the henhouse’ was central to my thinking for the cover, and the mood board I sent my publishing team during the design process. The henhouse is a metaphor for Europe’s delusional idea of itself as pure, white, and independently productive without foreign labor, and the fox signals to mischaracterizations of the Muslim immigrant as a violent thug infiltrating spaces that do not belong to him. My friend, the Malaysian Australian artist Abdullah Abdullah, has been playing with this idea in his work for many years, and I actually sent a photo of Troubling the Margins to the team to help cohere the idea. Closer to home, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us cover is doing a similar thing.
At the same time, we were also discussing how to incorporate the tableaus typical of Persian miniatures, and to convey the queerness common in that style. Though the book is told from the alternating point of view of two characters, it is very much an ensemble work, considering the ways that power and privilege impact different people during a period of rising authoritarianism in Turkey and the so-called European Migrant Crisis. In the end, this brilliant and almost psychedelic cover by Iman Raad was an amalgamation of both ideas.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Honestly breathtaking. I opened the email with the cover options from Ezra at 4am in the smoking area of a rave in Brooklyn and then crowdsourced opinions from strangers and friends in my vicinity. I was just seeking confirmation for what I already knew, which was that this was the one. Sometimes you can have it all. When you know you know!
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
What I love about the cover is that it doesn’t visually foreclose the question that the title opens up. The title encourages the reader to ask, who is God then? Who is this holy us? However, the cover resists easy personification or idolatry. Like the myth of the Simurgh in Sufi folklore, maybe the mighty bird at the end of the grand pursuit was within us all along.