Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Little Brown

Format: ebook

Pages: 368

Rating: 4/5 stars

Synopsis (Goodreads):

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and author of American Dervish, an American son and his immigrant father search for belonging — in post-Trump America, and with each other.

“Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” – Salman Rushdie

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure — at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds of 9/11 wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one — least of all himself — in the process.

My Review:

Thank you Little Brown for the copy of the book.
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A fictional account that looks at the life of one Muslim family from immigrating to the US, raising a family away from their family and culture, and what life was like after 9/11 for Muslim people in the US. I really appreciated this conversation about what the experience was like and the story was very poignant and heartbreaking. I thought the writing was very good and the characters engaging.
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The only thing I did not love about this book was it was written as if it was a memoir, so it went back and forth between the timeline and it felt like the main character was writing his autobiography more so than a fictional story about these experiences. But this is my own personal thing as I was expecting something different. That said, the writing was great and I enjoyed reading from the main character’s perspective!