A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.

As a financial crisis looms, Jamal “Jack” Shaban is trying to save the residents of his Chicago condo from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really?

Is he Midwestern, born and bred? Egyptian? Straight or gay? For his flight attendant colleagues, he’s an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Enter Marcia: an angry single mom new to Jack’s 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. All that anyone truly knows about Jack is how readily he sacrifices himself for peace between his embittered neighbors.

With Jack’s impassioned care for others at its heart, this gorgeous novel weaves past and present, tragedy and bittersweet comedy, into a brilliant allegory for this wounded world we must all share.

About the Author:

Naeem Murr is the author of three novels, including The Boy (a New York Times Notable Book) and The Perfect Man (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he’s been awarded a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago.