Every Exit Brings You Home 9781398564909 Hardback

A moving and haunting portrait of a Palestinian immigrants heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy’A heartbreaking and thrillingly suspenseful story about tragic histories and new beginnings.’Jenny Offill, author ofWeather’Deeply absorbing and passionately felt’Irish TimesThis is one of those rare stories that feels at once universal and impossibly strange, rooted in the ordinary challenges of the American Dream but lashed to horrors unfolding on the other side of the planet.Washington PostIn Naeem Murrs first novel in two decades, the conflicts, griefs, and hopes of a community of diverse immigrants in a Chicago condominium come to represent those of the wounded world we all must share.As the financial crisis of the late Noughties looms, all that anyone truly knows about Jamal Jack Shaban is how readily he sacrifices himself in his attempts to broker peace between his embittered neighbors. For his flight attendant colleagues, he is an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Believing that Jack is gay, Birdy knows nothing of Dimra, Jacks traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor isDimra aware of Jacks attraction to Marcia: an angry single mother new to the building. The resulting tangle of conflict, love and desire returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a love affair led him to exile and nearly destroyed his life.A man of many faces – adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and present – Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is darkness. Weaving poignant tragedy and bittersweet comedy, a tale of one mans blasted hopes and indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love, reread and remember.Timely and urgent,EveryExit Brings You Homeexplores Jacks hopes, sorrows, and regretsand, by proxy, those of immigrants everywhere.Harpers Bazaar