A Woman Is No Man

By: Etaf Rum, Susan Nesmai

Narrated by: Ariana Delawari, Dahlia Salem

Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times best seller.

Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of Arab culture in this heart-wrenching story of love, intrigue and courage.

Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of – dangerous, the ultimate shame.

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law, Fareeda, and strange new husband, Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children - four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family - knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past and her own future.

Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is a story of culture and honour, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. It is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.

©2019 Etaf Rum (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"A celebration of 'the strength and power of our women'." (Booklist)

"Sometimes heroism is loud and dramatic. Other times, it is daring to listen to that quiet voice within and having the courage to follow it... Etaf Rum has done a great service by sharing these voices with us." (Shilpi Somaya Gowda, New York Times best-selling author)

"A work of literary bravery." (Nadia Hashimi)

Deeply angered and hopeful at the same time

Reading this book gets you through a big range of emotions, from being angry to feeling hopeful.

It felt like a window through which I peeked at a different culture, family issues, trauma and interactions.

I deeply loved and appreciated this book as a whole, I empathized with the 3 generations of women and felt their sorrows and the generational trauma.

“It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them.”

But it always can start with the courage of one.