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An Unlasting Home

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"So fresh and unsettling that it will enchant you from the first page and linger for days after reading...Its epic family saga style echoes that of Hala Alyan's Salt Houses and The Arsonists' City, Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies, and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko." — Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

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    • Library Journal

      November 1, 2021

      A philosophy professor at Kuwait University who returned home from Berkeley after her mother's death and now struggles with loneliness and a sense of unbelonging, Sara faces a crisis when she's accused of blasphemy for teaching Nietzsche, which could lead to her execution. Blended into the narrative are the stories of Sara's grandmothers, proud Yasmine and poor-born Lulwa; Sara's ambitious mother, Noura; and Marie, the ayah who left behind her own children to raise Sara. Following the award-winning collection The Hidden Light of Objects; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 28, 2022
      This sweeping debut novel from Al-Nakib (after the collection The Hidden Light of Objects) imagines an alternate reality for contemporary Kuwait in which blasphemy is made a capital crime. Sara, a professor of philosophy at Kuwait University, has been accused of blasphemy by one of her students. The offending lesson was on Nietzsche; according to her lawyer, the text’s Arabic translation “sounds even more damning” than the original. She examines why she returned to Kuwait 11 years earlier after so many years away, most recently in Berkeley, Calif. Part of it was to be closer to the spirit of her late mother. She also considers how previous generations of her family endured their country’s painful draconian rule. Alternating chapters skip between Sara’s present dilemma and the difficult choices her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents made as they moved to Turkey, Iraq, India, and the U.S., only to find themselves ever again Kuwaitis. Al-Nakib renders each family member with care and exacting observation. As Sara’s verdict looms, this grapples profoundly with the limits of individual choice and the hold exerted by a person’s homeland. The result is accomplished and searing. Agent: Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary.

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