Bk Theme: Immigration

Eleven Words for Love: A Journey Through Arabic Expressions of Love

A lyrical narrative of a Palestinian family in exile explores universal bonds of family, loyalty, and friendship through the lens of eleven Arabic expressions for love. A family has fled their homeland in search of safety in another country, carrying a single suitcase. As their journey unfolds, the oldest child reflects on the special contents…
Martyr!

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new…
Other Words for Home

Jude never thought she’d be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives. At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American…
Salt Houses

On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the…
Behind You is the Sea

An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion. Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives…
Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature

Since the work of Edward Said first appeared, countless studies have shown the ways in which Western writers–sometimes unwittingly–participate in the oversimplified East/West dichotomy of Orientalism. Yet no study has considered how writers from the so-called Orient approach this idea. A wide-ranging survey of the vast and diverse world of Anglophone Arab literature, Immigrant Narratives examines the…
The Bastard of Istanbul

A “vivid and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Forty Rules of Love and The Architect’s ApprenticeZesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. –USA Today As an Armenian American living in San Francisco, Armanoush feels like part of her identity is missing and…
The Map of Salt and Stars

It is the summer of 2011, and Nour has just lost her father to cancer. Her mother, a cartographer who creates unusual, hand-painted maps, decides to move Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. But the country Nour’s mother once knew is changing, and it…
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life.Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is…
Hope is an Arrow: The Story of Lebanese-American Poet Khalil Gibran

A lyrical biography of Kahlil Gibran by award-winning writer Cory McCarthy, with glorious illustrations by Caldecott Honoree and two-time Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner Ekua Holmes.Before Kahlil Gibran ever put his pen to the page to eventually become the world’s third best-selling poet of all time, he was Gibran Khalil Gibran, a child immigrant…