An Unlasting Home

A Novel

By: Mai Al-Nakib

Narrated by: Leila Buck

Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

The debut novel from an award-winning short story writer: a multigenerational saga spanning Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States, and Kuwait that brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women.

In 2013, Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University, having returned to Kuwait from Berkeley in the wake of her mother’s sudden death eleven years earlier. Her main companions are her grandmother’s talking parrot, Bebe Mitu; the family cook, Aasif; and Maria, her childhood ayah and the one person who has always been there for her. Sara’s relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she always thought she would leave, and a country she recognizes less and less, and yet a certain inertia keeps her there. But when teaching Nietzsche in her Intro to Philosophy course leads to an accusation of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realizes she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all.

Interspersed with Sara’s narrative are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in the old town of Kuwait, swept off her feet to an estate in India by the son of a successful merchant family; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America and helping to shape its Mid-East policies, and Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to raise Sara and her brother Karim and, in so doing, transforms many lives.

Ranging from the 1920s to the near present, An Unlasting Home traces Kuwait’s rise from a pearl-diving backwater to its reign as a thriving cosmopolitan city to the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable epic and a spellbinding family saga.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Mai Al-Nakib (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Epic tale of struggle for dignity under patriarchy

This is a very special kind of book that tells a story about an individual, but also gives a window into the complex way that lives weave together in the multi-generational, multi-national web that is family against an ever-present background of society—multiple societies, really, and yet unified by common themes, most notably patriarchy in a variety of forms. The persistent struggle for dignity that women endure is at once poignant and instructive.

What I like about Mai's writing is how matter-of-fact it is. She doesn't editorialize. It's somehow left to the reader to decide how to interpret what they see, how to relate to it. And yet the story is inevitably compelling, so it's hard to see the events and not become emotional. The personal histories she relates are composed of elements that speak for themselves in powerful ways. (I had similar feelings about her earlier and quite excellent book of short stories, The Hidden Light of Objects.)

In some ways, I would liken this novel to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels (beginning with My Brilliant Friend). Both use an individual point of view to tell a story about society, adversity, and growth. And again both are even-handed in the face of unpleasantries, and yet also quietly optimistic in spite of all. These are unabashedly fictionalized accounts, and yet in some broader sense you come away with a kind of truth anyway, an understanding that such things have happened and do happen.

I listened to this book on audio, as I do all my reading. The performance by Leila Buck was excellent. I probably would have struggled with pronunciation of names or cultural terms, so it's nice to have that detail taken care of and to just focus on story.

I have no idea where Mai will go next with her writing, but I'm all set to pre-order.