April 15, 2024 – April is National Arab American Heritage Month. Recognized by President Joe Biden for the first time in 2021, the month honors the history and heritage of 3.5 million Arab Americans. This year’s theme is: “Celebrating Arab American Resilience and Diversity." The Arab American Foundation has information about the month and about Arab American history, as well as a book list with 75 titles to read this month. We decided to create a book list as well, of recently published novels that are written by Arab American and Arab authors, telling Arab American and Arab stories, all available to borrow from the Metro Library Network.
Browse the books below, and click on their covers to put them on hold in our catalog. Book descriptions are excerpted from the catalog, which pulls from information provided by publishers.
"Fencing with the King" by Diana Abu-Jaber (2022)
The King of Jordan is turning 60! How better to celebrate the occasion than with his favorite pastime – fencing – and with his favorite sparring partner, Gabriel Hamdan, who must be enticed back from America, where he lives with his wife and his daughter, Amani. Amani, a divorced poet, jumps at the chance to accompany her father to his homeland for the King's birthday. Her father's past is a mystery to her – even more so since she found a poem on blue airmail paper slipped into one of his old Arabic books, written by his mother, a Palestinian refugee who arrived in Jordan during World War I. Her words hint at a long-kept family secret, carefully guarded by Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King, who has quite personal reasons for inviting his brother to the birthday party. In a sibling rivalry that carries ancient echoes, the Hamdan brothers must face a reckoning, with themselves and with each other – one that almost costs Amani her life.
"What Strange Paradise" by Omar El Akkad (2021)
Looking at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child, this dramatic story follows Vänna, who comes to the rescue of a nine-year-old Syrian boy who has washed up on the shores of her small island and is determined to do whatever it takes to save him.
"The Wrong End of the Telescope" by Rabih Alameddine (2021)
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.
"An Unlasting Home" by Mai Al-Nakib (2022)
The debut novel from an award-winning short story writer: a multigenerational saga spanning Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States, and Kuwait that brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. In 2013, Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University, having returned to Kuwait from Berkeley in the wake of her mother's sudden death eleven years earlier. Her main companions are her grandmother's talking parrot, Bebe Mitu; the family cook, Aasif; and Maria, her childhood ayah and the one person who has always been there for her. Sara's relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she always thought she would leave, and a country she recognizes less and less, and yet a certain inertia keeps her there. But when teaching Nietzsche in her Intro to Philosophy course leads to an accusation of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realizes she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all.
Interspersed with Sara's narrative are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in the old town of Kuwait, swept off her feet to an estate in India by the son of a successful merchant family; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America and helping to shape its Mid-East policies, and Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to raise Sara and her brother Karim and, in so doing, transforms many lives. Ranging from the 1920s to the near present, "An Unlasting Home" traces Kuwait's rise from a pearl-diving backwater to its reign as a thriving cosmopolitan city to the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable epic and a spellbinding family saga.
"The Arsonists' City" by Hala Alyan (2021)
The Nasr family is spread across the globe – Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut – a constant touchstone – and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.
"The Thirty Names of Night" by Zeyn Joukhader (2020)
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that Laila Z's past is intimately tied to his mother's – and his grandmother's – in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z's story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his community that he never knew. Following his mother's ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.
"The Other Americans" by Laila Lalami (2019)
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of "The Moor’s Account," here is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant — at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui’s daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As the characters — deeply divided by race, religion, and class — tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.
"The Beauty of Your Face" by Sahar Mustafah (2020)
A Palestinian American woman wrestles with faith, loss, and identity before coming face-to-face with a school shooter in this searing debut. A uniquely American story told in powerful, evocative prose, "The Beauty of Your Face" navigates a country growing ever more divided. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter – radicalized by the online alt-right – attacks the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories: the bigotry she faced as a child, her mother's dreams of returning to Palestine, and the devastating disappearance of her older sister that tore her family apart. Still, there is the sweetness of the music from her father's oud, and the hope and community Afaf finally finds in Islam. "The Beauty of Your Face" is a profound and poignant exploration of one woman's life in a nation at odds with its ideals.
"A Woman Is No Man" by Etaf Rum (2019)
Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children — four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra's oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda's insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can't help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family — knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, "A Woman Is No Man" is a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. It is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.
"No Land to Light On" by Yara Zgheib (2022)
Hadi and Sama are a young Syrian couple in the throes of new love, building a life in the country that brought them together ... Now they giddily await the birth of their son, a boy whose native language would be freedom and belonging. When Sama is five months pregnant, Hadi's father dies in Amman the night before the embassy interview that would finally reunite Hadi with his parents and deliver them from a country in crisis. Hadi flies back to the Middle East for the funeral, promising he'll be gone only a few days. On the day his flight is due to arrive in Boston, Sama decides to surprise him at the airport, eager to scoop him up and bring him back home. She waits, and waits. There are protests at Logan airport, and Hadi never shows up. What Sama doesn't yet know is that Hadi has been stopped at the border.
