Will I love Homeland Elegies?

Why get hung up on whether this superb book is memoir or fiction? It's a hell-for-leather read. But more importantly, it's stunning is its truth, including whatever parts were embroidered or invented. I'm in awe of Akhtar's honest depiction of the experience of otherness, and that he avoided any whiff of victimhood. (Also, it has possibly the most intense and candid description of sex with a woman, from the point of view of a man, that I've ever read. Speaking of stunning truthfulness.)

This book calls itself a novel, but it is deeply intertwined with the author’s own life and experiences as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. The chapters often read more like incisive personal essays than segments advancing the plot of a conventional novel, as the author grapples with the economic obsessions and spiritual poverty of contemporary American culture, the experience of everyday racism and the rage it provokes, and the feelings of alienation that many immigrants feel from both their country of origin and their adopted home. 

The central preoccupation of the book is the difficulty of living as a complete,… show more.