Inspired by his volunteer work at Lesbos refugee camps over the years, Alameddine has written a deeply moving and innovative novel threading together the stories of one refugee family seeking asylum, a trans woman's coming of age, and a writer's struggle over how to relate the scope of such horrific humanitarian crisis.
Told from the point of view of a queer trans woman, the novel intimately explores how Mina came of age in a violent and repressive culture, drawing connections between being displaced from home and country and displaced from one's family and body-both physically and existentially.
It is also a book about creating meaningful art. Alameddine intricately, suspensefully unspools a strategy by which an author finds the necessary distance from reality in order to write what feels most personal and difficult, achieving a literary balance that has distinguished him as a rare writer whose prose can make you laugh while also breaking your heart.
Mina is the character who comes closest in spirit to Rabih's most popular heroine--and the one he says is nearest to himself-Aaliyah, of An Unnecessary Woman.
His breakout novel, An Unnecessary Woman was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN Open Book Award. The novel was named a Best Book of the Year by Washington Post, Kirkus, NPR, Amazon, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, The Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal.
His most recent novel, The Angel of History won the Arab American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and was named Best Book of the Year by Washington Independent Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Shelf Awareness.
Rabih Alameddine's groundbreaking contributions have also won him the Dos Passos Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger to international acclaim.
Will appeal to fans of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, The Ungrateful Refugees by Dina Nayeri, The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon, Viet Than Nguyen and Porochista Khakpour.
