Wow. I don’t think there’s anything I can say that could do this story justice. The way Tareq weaves heart with history, personal with political—it’s transformative. There’s so much generational heartbreak. His grandmother’s displacement during Nabka. His parents later fleeing the violence in Beirut. Then there’s Tareq. What outsiders might see as the calm after a generational storm, a life of middle-class London, is far from peaceful. Tareq recounts trying to navigate the post-war climate of peace and stability in London while yearning to clutch the ancestral fire that ignites for his homeland. He expresses the estrangement of living between places that’s only intensified by his queerness and the confusion and heartbreak that comes with falling in love with your best friend.

I said there wasn’t much I could say and then I rambled on for an entire paragraph providing nothing that could significantly capture how beautiful and vulnerable and heart-rendering Tareq Baconi’s story is. I’m so grateful I had the early opportunity to read it.

I appreciated Tareq Baconi sharing their story with the reader and enjoyed the concept of this book. The characters were everything that I was wanting and enjoyed going on this journey with the storylines. Tareq Baconi was able to create a strong story and enjoyed the overall storyline.

It's honestly a rarity that I pick up a nonfiction book and feel completely and utterly speechless, bereft, and also transformed, but WOW. This was an incredible, deeply personal, and moving testament to both the queer and Palestinian identity, and a man’s journey as he reckons with both over the course of a lifetime.

This book is a multidimensional, multifaceted wonder, as it's interspersed with splices of stories from Tareq's grandmother who fled Palestine during the Nakba, Tareq's mother and father who fled Beirut at the start of the civil war in Lebanon, and Tareq himself, fleeing in a way his own queer identity, as he simultaneously grapples with an inheritance of grief and resistance as a Palestinian in diaspora.

Tareq's profoundly vulnerable unpacking of both of his identities — and the ways in which they intrinsically intersect — is not only thematically compelling, it’s written so beautifully and so intimately it feels at times like a personal diary, something Tareq touches on in his acknowledgments, noting that 'writing is not a task to be done, but a life to be lived' — and what a life it is, as he shares generational histories and legacies of 'fire' passed down from his mother, his wrangling with his queerness in the face of '3eib', and the reckonings, both big and small, that make up one's journey.

There are so many threads that tie this story together with themes of transformative love: that which is unrequited, given to a best friend who is unable or unwilling to make space for it, that of a grandmother praying for her grandson’s well-being, that of a parent who sought to insulate their children from a legacy of grief and a lost home, that of himself, as he comes to terms with who he is, and ultimately that of a homeland only known secondhand.

Nothing I say about this beautiful story could ever do it justice, and I'm so grateful to Atria for allowing me the opportunity to read an advance copy. This releases on November 4, and I encourage any of you looking for something beautiful, transformative, and moving-to-the-point-of-tears to pick it up when it releases.