Every Exit Brings You Home: A Novel

ISBN: 1324117907

Author: Murr, Naeem

Condition: New

A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrants heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.Readers are rarely lukewarm on Naeem Murrs work, which has been compared by critics to an astonishing array of greats: Margaret Atwood, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Flannery O Connor, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulker, Vladimir Nabokov, and more. His novels are likely to elicit wonderment, as in the perfect book (Business Day, South Africa) and the best novel I've read in years (Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss). And in this, his first book in two decades, the conflicts, griefs, and hopes of an immigrant community in a Chicago condo come to represent those of the wounded world we all must share.As a financial crisis looms, Jamal Jack Shaban is trying to save his neighbors from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really? For his flight attendant colleagues, hes an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jacks traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor does Dimra know about Jacks attraction to Marcia: an angry single mom new to the 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.A man of many sides-adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and the novels present-Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is utter darkness.A gorgeous blend of gentle comedy and poignant tragedy, of blasted hopes and one mans indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love and never forget.