231 pages
English language
Published Sept. 11, 2017 by Riverhead Books.
"In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet-- sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors-- doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. [This book] follows the couple as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are."--From regular print book.
"In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet-- sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors-- doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. [This book] follows the couple as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are."--From regular print book.
Content warning I reveal the structure of the book.
This was a journey through the lives of the characters. It would be touching if you can be compassionate about immigrants being forced to leave their homes.
Really enjoyed this one. Well-written and touching.
A beautiful book about migration, and how that might look in the face of one big change in how the world works. Like so many migration stories, it starts with an intensely sad premise, and even though the book is not an unrelenting wallow in that, the sadness is never exactly absent.
It's written in a very distinctive style, full of long sentences that at times can be achingly beautiful, and at times feel like a useful device for conveying the complexity of the characters' entangled lives, but at other times also become rather grating, as though the author's forgotten that breaking a paragraph up into sentences is an option available to him, or just become too reliant on this device because when it does work it works so well, and I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because long run-on sentences are a common flaw in my own writing, …
A beautiful book about migration, and how that might look in the face of one big change in how the world works. Like so many migration stories, it starts with an intensely sad premise, and even though the book is not an unrelenting wallow in that, the sadness is never exactly absent.
It's written in a very distinctive style, full of long sentences that at times can be achingly beautiful, and at times feel like a useful device for conveying the complexity of the characters' entangled lives, but at other times also become rather grating, as though the author's forgotten that breaking a paragraph up into sentences is an option available to him, or just become too reliant on this device because when it does work it works so well, and I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because long run-on sentences are a common flaw in my own writing, but by the end of the book it was definitely taking something away from what was otherwise a wonderful read.
