In the 13 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many novelists have tackled their meaning and impact, both head on or obliquely, through their fiction. Think Netherland, Saturday or Falling Man. Iranian–American author Porochista Khakpour’s second novel is set in the years leading up to 9/11, navigating Y2K paranoia and concluding with a re-imagined version of the event itself.

Blending fabulist, magical realist and allegorical elements, The Last Illusion is a wildly unconventional coming-of-age story, based on a Persian folktale, with a highly unusual protagonist. Zal, of Iranian legend, is an albino child, abandoned by his parents and brought up by a mythical giant bird to become, against all odds, a great warrior. Fast forward 1000 years to New York, where a feral Iranian boy, also named Zal, is stumbling into adulthood while struggling to suppress his avian urges for flight and ingesting insects.

The characters and plot here wouldn’t be out of place in a Woody Allen film: a boy raised as a bird escapes a crazy mother, is rescued from Iran by a childless Manhattan child psychologist, then falls for an uptown anorexic aspiring artist and clairvoyant. He becomes enamoured with an impossibly vain illusionist, thwarts a creepy analyst and falls in love with his girlfriend’s obese sister. Zal’s misadventures are both funny and macabre: he gets a job frying chicken, develops a crush on a canary, fantasises about being fed in a nest and forces himself to cover mirrors. His quest to be normal is never easy.

Khakpour’s lyrical prose crackles with energy, both playful and deadly serious, creating a painful picture of otherness that offers a fascinating window to the pre-9/11 state of mind. This is an enthralling, richly layered read that illustrates how profoundly fiction can assist us in reflecting on and making sense of reality.

Sally Keighery is a freelance reviewer.