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A Novel
by Naeem Murr
A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant's heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.
As a financial crisis looms, Jamal "Jack" Shaban is trying to save the residents of his Chicago condo from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really?
Is he Midwestern, born and bred? Egyptian? Straight or gay? For his flight attendant colleagues, he's an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack's traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Enter Marcia: an angry single mom new to Jack's building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life. All that anyone truly knows about Jack is how readily he sacrifices himself for peace between his embittered neighbors.
With Jack's impassioned care for others at its heart, this gorgeous novel weaves past and present, tragedy and bittersweet comedy, into a brilliant allegory for this wounded world we must all share.
"A great novel: Beautifully written, timely, and as enjoyable as it is heartbreaking." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The much-lauded Murr's latest work is laden with cultural touchstones―sexuality, gender identity, immigration, and economic inequities... An edgy portrait of self-sacrifice and irreconcilable allegiances." ―Booklist
"A rich and complex portrait of the immigrant experience that has at its center a heartbreaking and thrillingly suspenseful story about tragic histories and new beginnings." ―Jenny Offill, author of Weather
"This poignant, at times hilarious, at times tragic, always compelling novel knocked me out. It's both intimate and expansive, digging deep into the emotional intricacies of love and into the devastation of war and the longing for family and home. As soon as I finished it, I bought the author's other books, so loathe was I to leave his assured, even brilliant, company." ―Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
"This is the best novel I've read in years, with everything a reader could want: complex characters, political wisdom, comedy, tragedy, soul. Naeem Murr has a particular gift for conveying the intimacies between characters, but his genius is for drawing his readers into the world of these intimacies and lives so vividly they won't want to leave it." ―Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
This information about Every Exit Brings You Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naeem Murr is the author of three novels, including The Boy (a New York Times Notable Book) and The Perfect Man (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he's been awarded a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago.
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