I am a novelist and journalist who has been writing about war and refugees for nearly two decades. In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos, which held one of the most inhumane refugee camps in Europe, to talk to people there about their lives and hopes. Out of this, I wrote several articles and later two books, including The Good Deed. My hope is to counteract the demonization of refugees, so rife in the world today, by bringing out all that we humans have in common, such as our need for shelter, food, family, safety, and love.
I listened to this book because I wanted to understand more about the history and people of Palestine as the 2023-24 war between Israel and Hamas was escalating to ever more deadly heights.
Abulhawa is a renowned Palestinian author, and this book was an international bestseller back in 2010, but I knew nothing of it at the time. I found the novel, a family saga stretching several generations from 1941 to 2022, so immediate, eye-opening, and moving that it was as if I were reading about the current war in real-time.
I loved it so much that I bought the actual book to keep forever.
A heart-wrenching, powerfully written novel that does for Palestine what The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan.
Mornings in Jenin is a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to…
I read this book a few years ago and have never forgotten it, it affected me so profoundly.
It tells the story of two Kurdish brothers in a mountain village in Iran who are forced to flee persecution and slaughter, one of whom ends up in California. Khadivi, Iranian herself, tells this with such haunting beauty and honesty that it still gives me chills to remember it.
It's part of a trilogy, and I've read all three, but this is my favorite volume.
Two brothers from a small Iranian mountain village-Saladin, who has always dreamed of leaving, and Ali, who has never given it a thought-are forced to flee for their lives in the aftermath of a political killing. The journey is beset by trouble from the start, but over the treacherous mountains they go, on foot to Istanbul and onward by freighter to the Azores.There, after a painful parting, Saladin alone continues on the final leg, on a cargo plane all the way to Los Angeles. He will have a new life in California, but will never be whole again without his…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Nayari's novel is also about Iranian refugees, but this story is set in Amsterdam, where an Iranian professional is struggling with her marriage, her identity, and her relationship with her father, who is still in Iran. While living in Europe, she learns of the dire straits faced by refugees from all over the Middle East and Africa, which makes for powerful and moving reading.
The writing is so intelligent and honest that this is one of my favorite novels of today.
“Rich and colorful… [Refuge] has the kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere.” –New York Times
The moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration and the contemporary refugee experience.
An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are…
This new novel from Libyan writer Matar is mainly a story about the love between friends, especially male friends, but that love is set against displacement and trauma and the psychological difficulties of being separated from one's country, family, culture, and identity.
A contemplative, deeply thoughtful novel, it is totally engaging and searingly honest, just as much about being a human being as it is about political ideologies or survivor guilt.
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
I’m Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missing…
This is a poetic, lilting, and truly original novel by an Eritrean-Ethiopian author who based the story on his own childhood in a Sudanese refugee camp.
The main characters are a young sister and brother, both bold, sexually fluid, and eager to break away from the stifling and often defeated culture of a refugee camp around them, which makes the story just as much about desire and love as it is about displacement.
I've never read anything quite like it before. It's surprising at every turn, and the writing is just stunning.
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos.
For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced…
Set against the backdrop of an overcrowded refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, this book tells the stories of five women, four of them refugees, and one American tourist. When the tourist does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as the story goes on.
At its heart, this is a novel about hope and perseverance, the tension between generosity and egoism, altruism and arrogance. But above all, it's about love.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
