Every Exit Brings You Home

De: Naeem Murr

A moving and haunting portrait of a Palestinian immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy

In Naeem Murr’s first novel in two decades, the conflicts, griefs, and hopes of a community of diverse immigrants in a Chicago condominium come to represent those of the wounded world we all must share.

As the financial crisis of the late Noughties looms, all that anyone truly knows about Jamal ‘Jack’ Shaban is how readily he sacrifices himself in his attempts to broker peace between his embittered neighbors. For his flight attendant colleagues, he is an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Believing that Jack is gay, Birdy knows nothing of Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor isDimra aware of Jack’s attraction to Marcia: an angry single mother new to the building. The resulting tangle of conflict, love and desire returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a love affair led him to exile and nearly destroyed his life.

A man of many faces - adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and present - Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is darkness. Weaving poignant tragedy and bittersweet comedy, a tale of one man’s blasted hopes and indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love, reread and remember.